Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

I genuinely do. Now, I will say that there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country living in a commuter hell. These are people with little or no access to public transport who are forced to use cars every day and who spend maybe two or three hours getting to work back and forth. Meath is a prime example. Meath is the biggest commuter county in the country. The majority of people in Meath leave the county to go to work every day. That happens in no other county in the country. Some 80,000 people in Meath are forced to use their cars daily. Navan is the biggest town in the country without a rail line.

For the majority of the people in question, there is a real cost to this. There is the financial cost, namely the car, the second car, the tolls, the fuel, the insurance, etc. It adds up to thousands of euro a year. There is, however, also a human cost that nobody is quantifying, and this is where parents do not get to see their kids from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.. A good deal of the anxiety happening among children relates to the fact that they have no access to their parents for the majority of the day because their parents are forced to commute such long distances over such long periods. Nobody is analysing that cost. Dublin is the most congested city in the EU. The time and labour costs involved in sitting in traffic are higher than in any other European country. The biggest weakness this Government has is in the delivery of significant infrastructure. Some €300 million spent on metro north and not a shovel put in the ground is a serious problem. If the Minister wants to make a difference, this is what he will have to tackle in terms of the delivery. The fact that the Spaniards were able to build about 35 miles of metro in Madrid for €2.8 billion and we have spent €300 million without putting a shovel in the ground is a real problem.

Look at the bureaucratic and regulatory nightmare we are in. The Navan to Dublin rail line was built in 1852 with picks and shovels in three years. The Department will spend more time on a route selection for this line. It will spend more time than the actual complete build just for the route selection. The railway order will take at least one or two years. The planning application will take at least three years. Therefore, before it builds one foot of rail line in County Meath, it will spend three times the amount of time in the preparation that it took to build it with picks and shovels in the 1850s. If we really want to get a hold of the lack of public service and infrastructure in this country, there will have to be a tackling of the regulatory and the bureaucratic nightmare involved in building absolutely anything here, from the national children's hospital to metro north. If there is one footprint the Minister can leave behind him, it is tackling that.

See this speech in context