Brendan Ryan (Labour)

There are a number of reasons for somebody based 160 miles from Dublin intervening in this debate, as I am doing now. For a variety of reasons over the last year, I have had to drive to Dublin virtually every week and, as a result, I have come to realise that Dublin's traffic is in an appalling mess.

When I was a child living in south Kildare, when most cars could not exceed 40 mph and the roads were infinitely worse than they are now, one could drive from my home town of Athy to anywhere in Dublin with the assumption that it would take no more than an hour. Now we have motorways, bypasses and ring-roads, a point on which Senator Ormonde was eloquent, and it takes two hours.

When I first moved to Cork it took three hours to get from Cork to Newlands Cross and a further half hour to get anywhere else I wanted to be in Dublin. It now takes three and a quarter hours to get to Newlands Cross and an hour to get to wherever one wants to be in Dublin. That is by car, after some of this provision has been made.