James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the unprecedented €3.9 billion investment in transport infrastructure in the budget. Since 2020, when the Government entered office, it has increased by €1 billion in the Department alone. It has gone from just under €3 billion to just under €4 billion. This is an increase of €1 billion since the Government came office. Looking at public transport infrastructure in the first instance, which is my primary interest or first love as we are discussing transport, because I use it myself regular basis, as do most of my constituents in Kildare, those in the greater Dublin area, those in commuter belts and those in all of our urban centres, we have invested unprecedented moneys in public transport infrastructure and in large projects and we continue to do so. Among the schemes being rolled out in budget 2025 are additional BusConnects routes in Dublin, the commencement of regional BusConnects, which will feature in Cork, Galway, Limerick and our regional cities, new town services, phase 4 of Connecting Ireland, including Cork, Donegal, Tipperary, Cavan, Clare, Kilkenny and Laois, and many more investments in public transport services. We will also continue the fare reduction of 20% introduced last year, and the new measure whereby kids under nine years of age go free. This means young persons can avail of public transport and their parents do not have to worry about the cost. If they ever did, they do not have to do so now with regard to young folk taking up the opportunity to travel on the services.

With regard to the big-ticket items, will continue to spend heavily on the rail network. The strategic rail review was recently completed. It looks at 2050 but money has been pledged towards it for 2025. We do not have to wait 25 years for it to take effect, thankfully. Among the many projects we could speak about that are being funded is MetroLink. I had the pleasure of meeting the new programme director, Dr. Sean Sweeney, this afternoon in Leinster House. He is a very fine gentleman from New Zealand with a Mayo connection. He has come to supervise the big dig as work starts on the metro connection to the airport. I am very confident it is in good hands. It is such a critical piece of infrastructure. As the programme director observed, it is a new canvas. It is not plugging into legacy equipment or legacy connections. They have the luxury of being able to start and finish it on a new track and new rail. It is a very important project.

We are continuing with the DART+ extensions, with DART+ Coastal North, DART+ Coastal South, DART+ West and DART+ South West. These are more usually known as Louth, Wicklow, Kildare and Meath. Effectively, these DART+ programmes will bring the highest quality, most regular, most frequent and most reliable commuter rail right around the commuter belt, effectively in an arc from Drogheda down and back around into Bray and Greystones.

The DART+ Coastal North has now progressed. Planning permission has been lodged for it and it is now in the system. Dart+ West came out of planning quite recently. We are awaiting a planning decision on DART+ South West. Since coming into the role I have asked the NTA to look at bringing the routes even further and, for example, extending DART+ South West to Sallins, which is envisaged in the greater Dublin area scheme, and ultimately onto Newbridge and beyond. I have asked about the DART+ West line going beyond Maynooth, where it terminates, to Kilcock and even to Enfield as we go further. If we are going to continue to develop our commuter belt, for all the good reasons of distributed housing and providing more opportunities for people to live outside Dublin yet access employment and educational services in the capital, we must support it. This must be a public transport driven development and not a private vehicle one. It is very important that we continue to do this. The Wicklow line is already well served by the DART to Greystones but it is envisaged in the greater Dublin area strategy to bring the DART to Wicklow town itself. This investment would be money well spent.

We also have 180 new carriages of the battery electric rail fleet being delivered. They will begin to make a difference. I know there are capacity issues, even today, on the commuter services in particular and that people are squeezed in. These 180 carriages have begun to arrive and some have already gone into service quite recently. More will be added to the fleet in the coming months. They will begin to help with capacity on the services. They are important aspects of the public transport picture.

Looking to active travel, €1 million for every day of the year is being invested in the budget for walking and cycling infrastructure. Since 2020, when the Government came into office, we have delivered 222 km of greenways in the country. We have also seen the Safe Routes to School programme, which enables schoolchildren to access school safely, with comfort and convenience and, most importantly, in a way that is demarcated and separated out from traffic. There has been an investment of €1.8 billion in active travel since the Government came into office, including plugging 275 schools into the Safe Routes to School programme. It is a very important programme and long may it continue. I have seen it in action in number of schools and it is working extremely well.

The roads network has an improvement this year of €1.365 billion committed to the national, regional and local roads networks. This includes €308 million for new national and local roads. The significant amount of €1.5 billion is another commitment to funding our roads and funding the infrastructure. This includes a maintenance budget, new roads, local roads, regional roads and supporting local authorities in their maintenance programmes and rolling out new initiatives. I will not get into the detail of individual projects now but I will say there are a number of specific roads about which concerns were raised over the summer, whereby particular projects in particular areas were perhaps at risk or at threat. People at Transport Infrastructure Ireland raised a flag and said certain projects may be unable to proceed because of the cost of labour, inflation and the cost of materials. We all know that building projects cost more tomorrow than they did yesterday, and this price escalation was a feature of construction. I have engaged with the Department and TII. The vast majority of these projects have been given the green light or I expect they will very soon. Certainly the councils will be instructed to tender in the coming days and weeks any project that is not yet tendered. This is a good result and a good win, and it is very important for our infrastructure. Colleagues may wish to engage with me on the detail of these and they are welcome to do so.

An additional €40 million has been set aside to support councils in rolling out the speed limit programme coming into effect later this year. It will start with our local roads having a default speed limit of 60 km/h. As I have mentioned many times in conversation since I took on this role, this is not a target and it is not mandatory, it is a default. Councils and councillors reserve the local government exclusive function to vary it up, down or sideways, whatever they wish to do. It remains the preserve of local authorities where local road engineers and local elected members know their own terrain best. They can vary it. The default, unless specified otherwise, for all the boreens with the grass tufts in the middle of the road will be 60 km/h rather than 80 km/h. This makes a lot of sense. We will support the councils in doing this.

Staying with motor vehicles, I am introducing a digital dashboard project in the Department. It is funded through the budget. It includes the replacement of our paper tax discs, insurance discs and NCT discs that we all tear out and, if you are like me, rip most of the time before slipping them into the dashboard every few months or every year when we get our renewal. This will become a thing of the past because it will be automated into a digital footprint that will travel with the vehicle and the driver as part of the national vehicle driver file. This is a project with our colleagues in the motor tax office in Shannon. They are doing a very fine job on the automation and digitalisation of the service. It will save paper. I believe 5 million discs are mailed out annually. It will save us all the hassle of trying to fidget with them and get them onto the dashboard and remember to put them in. It will enable our gardaí to have a view of a vehicle when it is travelling, using automatic number plate recognition on their handheld devices and in their squad cars for enforcement. It is a safety measure and an enforcement measure but it is also a convenience measure for all of us. It is something that is very welcome.

Significant money is being placed in the maritime arena. The Port of Cork has been granted a €99 million investment. I was there on Friday and I visited the team. They are ready to go with renewable energy. If we are going to power this nation through having offshore wind and rigs and connecting them to the grid, we need to have the infrastructure to get the kit out to sea, plug it into the cables and get it back onshore so that we can power this country. The almost €100 million investment will go a long way towards doing this. I congratulate the team at the Port of Cork. There is also great potential in Rosslare, Shannon Foynes and other ports.

I look forward to working with those in due course.

The Coast Guard has an allocation of €70 million for a new project that is due that is primarily for the provision of a new helicopter fleet, which will be of vital importance to the safety and security of our coastal communities and islands. It will be multifunctional. It will be primarily for rescue and search and recovery operations but will also assist with other types of missions. The helicopters can go where normal vehicles cannot access, and where the helicopters cannot go, the drones can go. There are a number of drones in the fleet as well, some of which I have seen in action. I thank the very talented and committed team, both professional and volunteer, of the Coast Guard for the good work they are doing.

On aviation, the budget includes a commitment to the regional airports. We are trying to balance the regional airports around the country for many reasons, not least the fact that we are constrained with a legacy planning cap for the time being at least. We are trying to work towards supporting the regional airports. There is a new fund of €17 million going towards Ireland West Airport Knock, Farranfore, Donegal and the other regional airports. I hope that will be of some support in helping to balance growth so that we do not have a situation in years to come where 86% of our connectivity is in one north Dublin location. It makes sense for many reasons to spread that around the country and bring it where the people are. That makes a lot of sense. There is a lot more I can say, but I will not because I am out of time. I thank the Ceann Comhairle for the opportunity to address Members on the budget, which I commend to the House.

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