Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The national development plan saw some projects blocked for ideological reasons. They did not make it in, and yet the Minister and his colleagues in Cabinet had the foresight to put in some enabling text. Sometimes that sentence at the end of a plan facilitates the projects that others would like to kill off. It allows them to proceed. I do not want to get the Minister to comment on specific projects but I hope that spirit of facilitation will continue, and that little sentence at the end of the plan will allow some of those projects to proceed through their statutory phases of design, public consultation, etc. I hope the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, as Minister in that Department, will be the guardian of that little sentence because it matters an awful lot in counties such as mine, where we have been waiting 15 to 20 years for some projects. They are not dead yet, and they will outlive a lot of people who serve in this House because of that little paragraph of text.

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