Derek McDowell (Labour)

When looked at in isolation it is difficult to quibble with the Clare Street initiative. It appears to be getting people together, some of whom have an interest or expertise in transport matters, some of whom do not, and brainstorming to come up with up with little ideas as opposed to big ones. It does not have a budget; it does not have a plan. It does not have authority to carry through what it wants to do. Nonetheless, it is an inoffensive little idea and looked at in isolation I would not have a problem with it. The difficulty is that it is impossible to look at this in isolation; one must look at the bigger picture, which is one of incomprehensible stagnation in terms of decision making.

One of the first things the Minister of State, Deputy Callely, did when he came into office was to make his Valentine's Day revelations of 14 February last when he prematurely announced the ten-year transport initiative referred to by Senator Morrissey. A couple of days before the Minister was due to make a similar announcement, in his most indiscreet fashion, Deputy Callely, announced a whole range of projects costing no less than €6 billion over the next ten years. The trouble is that the Minister of State, Deputy Callely, did not have any authority to say it, not from his senior Minister, the Department of Finance or anybody else. A couple of days later the Minister, Deputy Cullen, got up on his hind legs in the Dáil and said that the Minister of State, Deputy Callely, was a bit previous, he would soon bring proposals to Government and we would all hear about the ten-year plan a few weeks later at the beginning of March. That was a spat between the Ministers and the Department at the beginning of February. It is now the start of October, eight months later, and we still do not have a ten year plan. Although we are eight years into the Government's tenure we still do not have any plan at all for public transport in Dublin. This applies to small matters and more significant ones. It applies to matters regarding which there is overwhelming consensus and others regarding which there is a real decision to be taken.

Let me refer to one of the small matters, namely, integrated ticketing, with which everybody agrees — at least I have not heard of anybody who disagrees with it. I live close to Killester DART station and if I want to go to Heuston Station, I should be able to take the DART at Killester Station and transfer to the Luas using the same ticket. This makes perfect sense. The Leader of this House, when she was Minister for Public Enterprise, announced she would achieve this very shortly after she took up that office in 1997. We heard more or less similar announcements from the Department in the succeeding four years. The then Minister told us she had made progress and had provided funding for a study on how integrated ticketing might be achieved. Ultimately, she told us it could be achieved using a smart card. When she went out of power there was suddenly a hiatus and we did not hear much about the issue for some time. We were then told a slightly different smart card would be used and that a different company might operate the system. The Minister of State at the Department of Transport, Deputy Callely, told us at the end of 2004, shortly after he took up office, that we would have integrated ticketing. He said it was a wonderful idea which he had just conceived and that it would be in place substantively before the end of 2005. He said the Luas would introduce it earlier this year — it did something approximating it — and that Dublin Bus would introduce it towards the end of 2005. I do not know whether this is still the plan but I would love to know. No doubt the Minister of State will be in the House shortly, at which time he will tell us.

I am using integrated ticketing simply as an example of the paralysis affecting decision making and the incapacity to get anything done where there is a consensus regarding what should be done and where it is ascertained that it will not cost a fortune. We seem to be quite incapable of doing anything in such circumstances. I will be very interested to hear what the Minister of State has to say on this issue.

The Minister of State claims to have been inspired by the Munich experience when introducing the Clare Street initiative. This is well and good; I am sure he was. Munich is a city with which I happen to be familiar because I was one of the legion of Irish students who went there during the 1980s to study for the summer. I did so several times and therefore know something about how traffic initiatives developed there over the years. The circumstances that now obtain are such almost exclusively because of public transport, as Senator Morrissey rightly pointed out. When I first visited Munich in 1980, there were two U-Bahn lines, the U3 and U6 if my memory serves me well. There are now eight or ten. Over the succeeding quarter of a century, the city has built up a full structure of U-Bahn lines which serve virtually everybody, not only those living in the inner city but also those in the outer suburbs. This was done at a relatively reasonable cost.

Members of the Joint Committee on Transport visited Madrid a couple of years ago and it related a similar experience. It seems to be well within the ken and capacity of cities much the same size as Dublin to transform their public transport systems and put in place a comprehensive metro. However, we seem to be incapable of even making a decision in this regard. This is not to say we have not made a decision because the former Minister, Senator O'Rourke, said in 2000 that the Government was committed to providing a metro. Pretty much every reply to every parliamentary question on the issue since then involves a one-line answer by the relevant Minister to the effect that the Government is committed, under the programme for Government, to a metro for Dublin. We are not sure it is.

Iarnród Éireann produced plans in July 2004 which might sideline the metro. The Government seems to be totally incapable of making a decision. Will the Minister of State say what happened to the Iarnród Éireann plans of 2004, which included the plan for the interconnection between Heuston Station and Spencer Dock and the plan for the metro to Dublin Airport? These plans seem to have disappeared into some vast black hole in the Department of Transport which seems to sap the energy and initiative of all Ministers or anybody who gets involved with that Department.

I want to mention one or two issues that arose very briefly during the course of the discussion. Senator Paddy Burke mentioned supertrucks. I do not agree with him thereon but he reminded me of another issue on which we require a decision. The Government decided correctly not to increase the height of Dublin Port tunnel so as not to encourage supertrucks. They are just too big, they wreck our roads, they guzzle gas and petrol and their emissions are too high. I would have no problem if they disappeared. However, the Minister and his predecessors have been telling us for some years that they are to introduce regulations for heavy goods vehicles but they have not done so. There is a suspicion that the industry somehow "got to" the Department or Minister. Surely there can be no other good reason it should take so long to produce regulations. What is the position on the regulations? The Minister should bring some sort of certainty to the industry because, in fairness to it, it deserves it.

A plethora of different policies on buses has emerged from the Department in recent years. The policy which appears to have been favoured by the former Minister at the Department of Transport, Deputy Brennan, was bizarre in the extreme. He wanted to take a percentage of the fleet of Dublin Bus — probably a quarter — and franchise it out without providing for any increase in capacity within the city. He wanted to do so on the basis of some strange notion of competition, which I presume is based on the ideology he shares with Senator Morrissey. I do not know the current position and I presume the citizens of Dublin and the providers of public transport, including Dublin Bus, do not know either.

The truth is — this is good news — that the Dublin Bus fleet has improved considerably in recent years in terms of its reliability, the standard of provision and the comfort of the buses. Usage is increasing also, which is partly due to the creation of the quality bus corridors. I hope we have decided not to interfere with Dublin Bus. I have no problem with franchising out new routes, nor do I have a problem with competition on existing routes given that it operates in a planned and organised way, but the notion of simply franchising out part of the network and taking it from Dublin Bus in a way that would not increase capacity was always daft. The Minister of State should confirm that this notion is dead and buried.

I wish the Minister of State, Deputy Calelly, well with the Clare Street initiative. It seems his big ideas of Valentine's Day have given way to a series of small ideas, none of which he is willing to share with us today. I guess the initiative cannot do any harm but I, for one, am not holding my breath.