Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I enjoyed Senator Mansergh's contribution. He made a reference to when he was a young man, but I consider he is still a young man.

If this were ten years ago rather than now, we would criticise the Government for its lack of planning. We stumbled into the Celtic tiger era without much planning or foresight and we are lucky that matters turned out as they did. Ten years ago the position was different. The Government seems to have contracted a planning disease, with plans coming out of its ears on even the slightest provocation. What is nasty about this planning disease is not that it involves making plans but that it does not involve carrying them through. A symptom of this disease is that the Government fools itself into believing there is a special virtue in making a plan even if it never implements it. Making a plan that is not implemented is not a virtue but a vice. While I accept the Minister's heart is in the right place, this is a vice to which the Government seems particularly prone.

Only yesterday we had a good debate on road safety. It focused attention on the fact that the Government's national road safety plan has been largely unimplemented. Yet the Government seems to believe it can continue trumpeting the fact that it conceived the first ever national road safety plan. That was eight years ago, yet much of it remains on the shelf.

Another casualty of the planning process was the national spatial strategy. It was a long time in gestation and no sooner was it born than the Government turned its back on it. The final nail in that coffin was the Government's decentralisation plan, which disregarded the spatial strategy, turning it on its head. I cite those plans as examples and I could continue.

We have had plans to roll out broadband, which I raised on the Order of Business some time ago, but they have not worked. We are still at the bottom of the European and OECD leagues in terms of broadband penetration. We have also had the mother and father of all plans, the national health strategy, which was announced approximately four years ago and its implementation is no closer to reality now than when it was first drawn up.

I spell out this sorry litany of plans that did not come to fruition to make the point, if it needs making, that any new Government plan has a difficulty in terms of being credible. That is the challenge the Minister faces on this occasion. It is especially the case with this transport plan because we have all been here before in terms of this debate. Transport 21 has already been described as a slimmed-down version of previous transport plans that were left on the shelf for various reasons. The plan gets whittled down but the hype about it does not.

Notwithstanding that, there are aspects of this plan that are worth welcoming. One of them is the new emphasis on public transport — I welcome the Minister's input in this respect — rather than providing more roads. For more than ten years I have pleaded for public transport to be at the centre of our transport strategy, rather than our approach to it being a futile attempt to keep ahead of the growth in road traffic, which is what happened in the past. By concentrating almost exclusively on our road system, we have denied people the means to exercise a meaningful choice. People cannot use public transport if it is not available. Indeed, they will not use public transport even if it is available unless it is quality public transport, a system that offers people a real alternative to travelling by car.

During the past ten years our transport policy has been like a cat chasing its own tail. We have constructed a road system that has facilitated the massive urban sprawl that has taken place around our cities. As people have been driven out of the cities by high house prices — we have made it easy for that to happen — it has made the problem worse, to say nothing of the congestion it has caused. The result is that hardly has a motorway been built but it is declared out of date and there is a call for plans to widen it, as is the case with the M50.

The only sensible place to begin planning a national transport system is with public transport, not the road system. We acted back to front in the past, starting with the road system and later developing a transport policy. As a result of not doing the right thing, Dublin has ended up looking a bit like Los Angeles, a city to which there is no centre. The only difference is that people in Dublin do not have as many cars as the people in Los Angeles. If Transport 21 results in a different approach that gives priority to public transport for the first time, I welcome it, although it is a little late in the day to do so.

However, I stress that I do not welcome the plan as such but the intention to put it into place. I presume that intention is real. It is real in terms of the commitment of the individuals involved, but the implementation of such plans does not seem to happen. I propose to give the Government the benefit of the doubt on this plan.

I wish to make a criticism of the plan. If I understand it correctly, the intention is to create a single authority that will bring together all Dublin's transport development, whether that takes place by road or by the various means of public transport. We must welcome that, but it does not go far enough. To bring all the transport planning together while omitting consideration of land-use planning makes no sense. There is no point in joining-up part of the picture and leaving out one of the most important parts of it. I am at one with the Dublin city manager, Mr. John Fitzgerald, who expressed himself forcefully on this point.

For the past ten years we have made a dog's dinner of our transport planning. I had hoped to be able to welcome Transport 21 as a turn in a new direction, but unless we revisit the functions of the proposed Dublin Transportation Authority I fear this new effort will be as inappropriate to the real needs of the country as all previous attempts have been. The Minister will appreciate this is not a criticism of the plan but of our inability to put plans into effect. I wish the Minister well in doing that but I want to see determination on his part rather than simply being satisfied with the drawing up of the plan.