Aideen Hayden (Labour)

It is an excellent place.

It would be very tempting to start building many schools on greenfield sites but the reality is a lot of older urban areas have suffered from significant ageing population. Infrastructure and services are in place in areas which do not have children to fill schools. We need to go back to the drawing board to some extent, in terms of planning, rather than being driven by the immediate demand we are facing.

With regard to the proportion of the programme devoted to transport infrastructure, it is important to acknowledge that Ireland, due to the actions of the last Government, made major strides in the transport system. It is only logical that when we reach a point in time where we do not have to keep pushing money into the same road system, we are able to move on.

We should not be decrying the fact that we are cutting the transport budget, despite the fact it was decried in the national media. The transport infrastructure in Dublin has suffered through successive decades of Governments ignoring its issues. I would loved to have seen the DART interconnector. I disagree with Senator Barrett; we are probably one of the few capital cities in the world where one cannot arrive at an airport, get on a train, get into the centre of town and join an integrated rail structure.

I would also have loved to have seen metro north. Some of the poorest areas of this country are in the north of Dublin city and metro north would have brought some much needed jobs, despite not being the best return on capital investment in terms of employment. I am very sorry these projects are not proceeding. I welcome the Luas interconnector. It is one of three projects and I hope the Minister has a chance to revisit the other two.

I concur with Senator Barrett. We must ensure that projects which comes to selection processes have been robustly arrived at. Individual Departments conduct their own analysis on which projects should proceed but it is not clear to the ordinary man or woman on the street how decisions on particular projects were reached.

I am conscious that decisions were made by the last Government - I will use the Minister's constituency as an example - where money that was set aside for the N11 around the Beehive, a particularly dangerous section of road, was shelved in favour of the ring road around Waterford because it happened to be the pet project of a particular individual.