Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Minister of State, Deputy Harkin, for taking this debate late on a Thursday evening, on the last sitting day of this term.

I would like to talk about the town of Swords in north County Dublin. It is the third largest town by population in Ireland, but it is still treated culturally like a small village with a few airport workers in it. I am not sure how familiar the Minister of State is with Swords, but it is absolutely massive and is undergoing huge change. There is a massive amount of housing being built in Swords, which is welcome. It is all types of housing, from apartment blocks to three- or four-bedroom housing, and it is coming at scale.

Unfortunately, the infrastructure is not coming with the housing. We are currently gridlocked with traffic due to multiple upgrades and works being carried out. I know you cannot make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, but there is a disconnect in the planning of these projects that is causing havoc in Swords. We have a massive issue with our bus network, from bus stops to bus services, and again, we do not have a rail link yet. MetroLink has begun and I believe it is coming, which I am happy about, but it is still ten years away and we have a town of 55,000 people which is getting larger. It is larger than Sligo town and Waterford city; it is absolutely huge. We need bus services, special education classes and some entity to co-ordinate this. It is beyond the county council's capacity, and the Department of housing and infrastructure needs to do this.

Where this is currently hitting hard is in wastewater treatment. We have a very small wastewater treatment plant that has been there for 40 or 50 years and which serviced a much smaller town. It is currently being retrofitted and upgraded, but those works are being delayed. I cannot get across to the Minister of State the smell in the town of Swords right now, particularly in the northern part of the town, because of the upgrading works on the wastewater treatment plant. This is something that has been recurring for years upon years. We need a wastewater treatment plant that is befitting a town of the size of Swords. We need the greater Dublin drainage project to come in for the wider Dublin area, but the people of Swords are suffering.

We do not have our primary care centre yet and we do not have our bus service. Our MetroLink is ten years away and we have traffic gridlock. We do not have enough schools and we have a wastewater treatment plant that is absolutely buckling under the pressure. We welcome the houses. There were no mass protests about housing development in Swords. The majority of people who live there moved there, like myself, in the past 20 years and love living there. We know we need houses and we need sustainable communities, but we cannot deliver this unless we deliver the infrastructure with it.

I ask the Minister of State to have the Department of housing bring in some taskforce or infrastructure manager to monitor, lead and deliver what Swords needs at this point, whether it is a bus stop or a wastewater treatment plant. I do not believe there is a town as big as Swords anywhere else in the country that is undergoing a similar level of growth at this time.

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