Brendan Ryan (Labour)

The reality is that NTR, owned by people who were good friends of Fianna Fáil, was given a sweetheart deal. Let us remember what happened. NTR took fright with the East Link and so were guaranteed against loss. After experimenting and discovering that one could make a great deal of money out of bridges, NTR said it wanted to build the West Link, and in that case a guarantee against loss was not sought because it knew what it was facing. The truth is that in spite of all of the other problems, that bridge and those toll booths are a major nuisance for commuters. It is impossible to get away from that. The question for someone living away from Dublin is how to relieve the misery of almost 1 million people in the 100,000 vehicles per day that go through there.

When the second bridge was built how did somebody agree that there would be a smaller number of pay booths than there is proposed for the Portlaoise to Castletown motorway or the Fermoy bypass? In those cases, the forecast traffic in 20 years time will be less than 30,000 vehicles per day. Each of those will have six or seven booths in each direction. On a motorway that has 100,000 vehicles per day there are five booths in each direction and nobody thought about doing something about that at the time of the reconstruction of the second bridge. The second bridge was not in the original contract so how is it tied into it? Why is that copper-fastened? Somebody agreed to that deal with NTR which meant it was alright to do the same thing twice. The logic is not there. An indefensible position is being created. The little hint at the end of it that will delight commuters in Dublin is that tolling on the West Link will continue long after 2020 to finance the M50 widening. I have no problems with tolling. My party takes a different position but I am well able to argue with my party and my colleagues and have done for years.