Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I always enjoyed my time in the Gleneagle. I will speak briefly. I am very disappointed this morning to hear that the plan for a civic plaza at College Green has been turned down by An Bord Pleanála. This issue is about the €10 million proposal to pedestrianise the space in front of Trinity College, to the side of Bank of Ireland and up Dame Street and to turn the area into a vibrant, car-free, child-friendly central plaza for Dublin city. The space was identified as potentially the most important civic space in Dublin by Dublin City Council's public realms strategy in 2012. It is hugely important in terms of building Dublin as a liveable city. I have not yet read the report in full, only the reasons and considerations. The report was released this morning. It throws it back to Dublin City Council to go back to the drawing board again to sort out what An Bord Pleanála considered to be significant shortcomings associated with the traffic modelling and the effects of bus rerouting. The people of Dublin deserve a city that flows, in that they can get where they want to go, but it should be a liveable, child-friendly, pedestrian city. This is a project I passionately support but we need to get it right.