Brian Hayes (Fine Gael)

If one pays a toll, one should at least get the benefit of the toll itself. I regularly travel to Dunleer on the fantastic new Belfast to Dublin roadway. I am willing to pay the toll at Dunleer when I travel on the Belfast-Dublin road, which is an excellent new road and a credit to those who had the engineering and planning sense to put it in place, because I know I will skip the congestion at Drogheda and save 15 or 20 minutes. I do not shave any time of my journey when I use the M50. When the Dunleer bypass was being negotiated with National Toll Roads, a specific clause was inserted in the agreement that stated that in the event of a build-up of cars on that section of the route, the bridges will be automatically released and the cars can pass through. The same arrangement should apply to the toll plaza on the West Link. It should be possible to renegotiate the agreement with NTR in order to lift the toll barrier in the morning and between the peak hours of 4 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. or 7 p.m. to alleviate the existing difficulties for motorists on the West Link. If this arrangement is good enough in Dunleer, it is good enough for the West Link. This option is a feasible one, as opposed to the idea of simply buying out the toll. The lack of this provision was a major fault of the negotiations, not only those going back to 1987 but those that surrounded the last phase in 2000 to 2001.

Those of us who live on the M50 and local authority members who regularly point out these difficulties in South Dublin County Council and Fingal County Council witness the National Road Authority's illogical position on crash barriers. Although we see crashes on the M50 on a regular basis, we were told by the NRA that we could not have crash barriers. The councillors and the Minister for Transport both demanded crash barriers and now the NRA has suddenly done a U-turn and decided to introduce barriers. Politicians were calling for crash barriers ten years ago and were ignored by the NRA, which is another State quango with no democratic accountability. I ask the Government to renegotiate the agreement with NTR regarding peak times on the West Link toll plaza to enable frustrated motorists to get through the bottleneck on the M50.