It is important to remember that this Government had available to it a virtual consensus about what needed to be done. Opinion formers and policy makers gave up making the case for a road based solution in Dublin many years ago. I was a member of Dublin City Council for 12 years until earlier this year and virtually every councillor of the 52 in that body had long since bought into the view that we could not solve the problems of transport in Dublin – getting people from A to B, particularly into the city centre and out again – by using roads. It could not be done. We were all agreed on this, sometimes to our political cost. I recall more than one meeting in my constituency at which views were loudly expressed by car users that QBCs were a waste of space and that we should be concentrating instead on widening the roads. All of us in our time have opposed those views and there has been a consensus available to Government.