Barry Ward (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I wish to raise the S2S, which is a coastal promenade and cycleway around Dublin Bay, from Sutton to Sandycove, which is where the name comes from. I am particularly concerned about the bit between Merrion Gates and Dún Laoghaire Harbour. I was first elected to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in 2009, but before I was ever elected I was in favour of this plan. It existed long before I ever got involved. I credit people like Michael Collins in Blackrock who have kept this idea alive. It has been singularly the most frustrating thing I have had to deal with as a politician at any level because this is a universally supported measure. It makes perfect sense on so many different levels. We are talking about a combined cycleway and promenade outside the DART line around Dublin Bay, so you have no traffic lights and no interaction with cars, it is safe, it is a direct route for commuters in and out of town, it is a healthy place for people to enjoy recreation, it would be a tourist attraction and it is something that exists in all kinds of other cities around Europe. Yet we do not have it in Dublin, and the question is why we do not have it. I do not know the answer to that because it makes absolutely no sense that we do not have it. During my time on the council and in the Seanad, I argued for this to happen. It is through a combination of bureaucratic laziness and myopia that it has not happened. It is enormously frustrating. There is almost universal support for this. Some councillors in Dún Laoghaire were against it, but the vast majority of us were for it. In fact, I formed a committee with Dublin City Council exceptionally under the Local Government Act to progress this and we still did not get anywhere, notwithstanding commitments from the management in Dún Laoghaire that we would have environmental impact studies, etc.

The main stumbling block from the beginning was a ruling or a decision from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, that this would affect birds roosting on Sandymount Strand or Booterstown Strand, the part of Dublin Bay that dries out at low tide, where birds do land. People walk their dogs there, the dogs run at the birds, the birds fly up and then they land again when the dogs have passed. The notion that a cycleway and a walkway along the side of the DART line would interfere with those birds roosting is absolute nonsense. The thing that really frustrates me, though, is that it was never substantiated by the NPWS. It just made this vague assertion that there was a problem and it was never backed up.

When the then Minister, John Gormley, was in the Department of the environment, he declared Dublin Bay to be an special area of conservation, SAC, and a special protection area, SPA. I do not have a problem with that. What they did in the Custom House, however, was get a big map and a marker and draw the outline of the SPA and the SAC. We have no notion of where the boundary relating to both is because when you get down to ground level, the marker, the actual boundary, is several metres wide. Nobody can tell me where the boundary actually is. The other problem is that you cannot build it because it is in the curtilage of an SPA, but how do we even flipping know where that is? Nobody can tell me.

Two weeks ago I went to an east coast railway infrastructure protection projects, ECRIPP, consultation in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire, where Iarnród Éireann showed us the plans it has to rebuild the DART wall. The Dublin to Kingstown railway, built in 1834, crossed the sands, created a lagoon at Boosterstown and created Blackrock Park. Ultimately, it also created a relatively straight line along there. The wall is now ageing, however, and in bad weather - hurricanes, low pressure and high tides - the wall is overtopped by the sea, so they have to build it up. Nobody has a problem with that, but those responsible for ECRIPP have proceeded to build this wall. This was the greatest opportunity to build the S2S on top. The original DART wall is 8 m wide. Tell me there is not space there to have a cycleway and a footpath. Instead, they are building a wall that is not going to facilitate it. The consultation is nil from the point of view of the things people have said about what should happen, and they are going to spend millions of euro building a wall that does not even facilitate a basic community facility that would benefit us all. I want to know why that facility cannot be built. Nobody can tell me. It does not make sense and it is disregarding what people want in the area.

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