Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

The greater Dublin region is grinding to a halt. If you stand on any bridge on the M50 in the morning and look north or south, a stationary line of cars stretches out as far as the eye can see. The cost of congestion is going to reach €1.5 billion by 2040. Dublin is ranked the worst capital in Europe in terms of time and money wasted because of traffic congestion. Incredibly, studies show that the average speed of a car is now 12 km/h. That is slower than the horse-drawn carriages of the 19th century, believe it or not.

Hundreds of thousands of people in this region are living in a commuter hell. Many parents are leaving before 6 a.m. and are not back until 7 p.m. in the evening. They are lucky if they get time to even put their kids to bed. I have no doubt this is leading to the anxiety that many children are experiencing because they are separated from their families for so long. Volunteerism is also dying in many of the commuter hell areas because people have so little energy when they come back from their commute to be able to help in community activities.

Traffic congestion in the greater Dublin area is grinding people down. A return journey for tens of thousands of people in Meath is taking four and a half hours daily, and it is approaching five hours. If we think about it, that is 20 hours a week commuting for a 40-hour working week. Meath is the biggest commuter county in the country, the only county in the country where the majority of workers leave the county every day to go to work. There are 90,000 commuters, 60,000 of whom are forced to use cars because of the lack of public transport. Navan is the biggest town in the country without a rail line.

In 1994, Fianna Fáil's Noel Dempsey promised to build the rail line from Navan to Dublin. Now, Deputy Aisling Dempsey, his daughter, is promising the rail line. The promise is now intergenerational. It is incredible. The current delivery, from concept to completion, is 42 years. That means that a person starting work in their early 20s, when it was announced, will have retired and be drawing the pension before it is actually delivered. In 1862, the same rail line was built in a matter of three years with picks and shovels.

Yesterday, we saw the launch of the national development plan review. There was one mention of the Navan to Dublin rail line, with no mention of any development that would progress it faster and no ring-fenced funds for it. Bizarrely, there was a mention of building the stations on a line where it has not even been decided what direction the line will go.

On Thursday, 4 December, there will be a public meeting of the Meath on Track campaign in Meath. All I am asking the Tánaiste to do at this time is to ask the senior transport Minister to listen to the people of Meath and the frustration in the country around this issue and to attend that meeting and listen to exactly how it is affecting so many people in Meath. Will the Tánaiste commit to that here today?

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