Micheál Martin (Cork South-Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is highly speculative and highly uncertain about what will transpire. I listened to the authors this morning.

Suffice it to say, the Government is committed to achieving our targets. It will be very challenging, because as soon as we move on any one of them, different elements of the Opposition will oppose some of the measures we have announced and taken. A huge retrofitting programme is under way and our public transport usage is up 25%. We are fully committed to all the public transport initiatives we committed to in the previous Government. The issue is when those get realised and get through the various plannings and so on, be that metro or light rail in the various cities, but they are all progressing and will progress, and they are not mutually exclusive from road building either. If you talk to people in Macroom, they will tell you very quickly about the impact on emissions in the towns of Macroom or Ballyvourney of the Ballyvourney bypass. This idea that all roads are bad is a nonsense too, because sometimes they can be hugely environmentally beneficial to residential communities who have had to suffer terrible emissions and have been trapped in emissions clusters because of the lack of bypasses and so forth.

See this speech in context