Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. Looking around me, we are surrounded by members of the Green Party, including the Acting Chairperson, Senator Garvey. It is a happy situation that the Acting Chairperson is here.

I want to express my agreement with Senator Pauline O'Reilly that we have to rethink many issues, but the rethinking is not all one way. It is not all rethinking on the part of people who are not environmentalists. Some environmentalists have to do a bit of rethinking too.I will give the House one example. An Taisce and members of the green movement - I am not so sure of the position of members of the Green Party, in particular - were all against one-off housing in rural areas as a bad thing. With the roll-out of broadband technology and such developments we are going to have to rethink this notion that it is a good idea to concentrate people in villages and towns for environmental reasons. I wonder if that is sustainable and I do not think that it coincides with what most Irish people want. If one looks at an Ordnance Survey map of the 1800s or 1900s, for example, our population has always been scattered and it is naive in my view to think that the orthodoxy of ten years ago, which is that we should get everybody into villages and towns and wave a magic wand over society, is the way forward. I do not think that it is any more.

My second point is to ask environmentalists to consider the following matter: if we have all electric or hydrogen vehicles in ten or 15 years' time, there is still going to be the same requirement for people to move from A to B for various reasons and there is no reason to give up on roads. I agree with Senator Pauline O’Reilly in that roads are not inherently bad but there is no need to stop the road to Sligo or to stop connecting the north west by really usable roads to Dublin. It should still be a convenient journey for our hydrogen-powered lorries and electric-powered cars.

I agree with Senator O’Reilly that rail is a good thing. In ways I am a railway buff myself but I have to say that there has to be a sense of the realities here. When talking about rail for cargo transport in Ireland, this is a model that we had in the 19th century and up to halfway through the 20th century but it is really not that efficient to take stuff off and on to trains and to put it onto vans and lorries for distribution around the country. Anyone interested in railways would have looked at the Reshaping of British Railways Beeching report and at how lorries killed the railways, branch lines and much freight transport. We must be practical about these things. Lorry transport, whether it is hydrogen or electric or whatever, is going to be an important part of the country’s transport from now on.

Moving to Dublin city, I was involved professionally in a matter which had to do with planning for satellite towns outside of Dublin in Kildare. I noticed that Senator Martin referred in the House to people possibly commuting from Kildare to Dublin by bike. God bless them if they are going to do that in the winter in Ireland. However, we have to consider if it is a good idea for people to spend two or three hours of their lives commuting daily in and out of cities. The wider implication of that is that we have to rethink our cities. What is going on in Dublin at the moment is an absolute scandal. We are not rethinking Dublin at all. It is okay to say we will have more cycleways. I support and have always supported the idea of making Dublin a much more cycle-friendly city. I will not give out about that but I believe the idea of reimagining Dublin requires much more radical approaches to urban renewal and planning. The Minister will know from our own patch of the woods that the proposal to build a 14-storey apartment block on a suburban road in Donnybrook, a tower block, is an extraordinary departure from what would normally be considered decent planning. Density and high-rise are not necessarily the same thing. One only has to look at Portobello in the Minister’s own constituency, or Oxmantown, to see high-density occupation of land but no high-rise.

There is a need to bring the community along with things. In Dublin, in particular, the changes to the road use, the pedestrianisation and the de-vehicularisation of areas have to be planned very carefully because when “normality” returns, if ever it does, we are going to be faced with a rotten core at the city centre if we do not have access to it.Not everyone can go by bus or by train. With regard to BusConnects in particular, one cannot do the weekend shopping, collect children from a crèche and bring other children to school by bus. People have to give up the idea that buses are the answer to everything. Individual mobility is all important.

This is not a time for people who wear their environmental credentials on their sleeve to say that this is the moment when we rethink everything. It is time for them to do a lot of rethinking. Where are the Luas lines to Lucan and Finglas? I want to see many practical changes from those instead of simply talking about environmentalism, and I mean that in the warmest possible sense. I welcome the Minister and thank him for his contribution.