Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for attending this debate. I also thank all of the front-line workers in the transport sector who have played a pivotal role. In particular, I thank the taxi drivers in our cities and towns, many of whom have delivered food to the most vulnerable. I thank the bus drivers who have maintained the operation of bus fleets and train drivers who have done the same with the train service.

I will raise with the Minister the issue of trains and rail transport. If Covid has shown us anything, it has been the lunacy of the commute by car into city centres by tens of thousands of workers. Day after day, workers got up as early as 5 a.m. to beat the traffic into city centres and battled the stress of trying to get to their places of work. Now, after nearly a full year of working from home, people have pressed the reset button and asked what in God's name we were doing. What were we doing to our mental health, the fabric of families and our children, who we were placing in childcare before the sun had even come up? Many of us have been making these points for many years and said these exact words. RTÉ, in its “Prime Time” programmes, has examined commuting and families having to put their kids into childcare at the crack of dawn. All we get in response is an accepting nod and everything just moves on. The reason was the rat race of which we are all part. People either got with the rat race or they were left behind and someone else took their place in the rat race. The pandemic has reset the button and we are collectively asking ourselves why the hell we were doing that to ourselves and taking apart the very fabric of society. It was madness.

I do not advocate that people simply withdraw from cities and places of commerce. People benefit from working with colleagues. I am a strong advocate of that as I come from a large urban centre. I am saying that moving people from their places of residence to their places of work should and must be done by the same means as it is done in all other major cities on the planet, namely, high-quality public rail. The reset of society offers many areas the opportunity to grasp that approach with both hands. I know the Minister is passionate about rail transport and a strong advocate of it. Hundreds of thousands of people commute to work in Dublin from counties Meath, Kildare, Louth and Wicklow. Most of them are Dublin people who, through planning and housing policies, have been forced to move out to commuter areas. The key difference between County Meath with its population of 200,000 people and the other commuting counties is that we are the only one of them whose county town has no rail connectivity.

Eleven years ago, during the last Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government, in which the Minister served, a significant piece of rail infrastructure was developed connecting a refurbished docklands station at the back of the convention centre to a station at Pace on the far side of Dunboyne in County Meath. The new station, which is located off the M3, was built with a car park with 1,000 parking spaces to allow people to commute into the city.That line opened on 2 September 2010 and I was lucky to be one of the very first passengers from the Docklands to Dunboyne, along with the then Minister, Noel Dempsey, for the official opening. There was a great hope that the railway order for the second phase, a continuation of the line to Navan, would be lodged the following year. That was shelved, however, by the succeeding Government and it has remained on the shelf ever since. Worse was the fact the National Transport Authority took it off its list of projects five years ago.

Thankfully, there is a reappraisal of this project. The mood music from both the National Transport Authority and the Minister is far more positive. I have said in this Chamber before that there is a big difference between this Minister and his predecessor. The first is that this Minister has actually been to Navan. I invited the previous Minister to come to Navan to see the difficulties. He sat in the chair in which the Minister is sitting now and said he would be down but just not too early in the morning. Five years later, I am still waiting for him.

I am confident that because this Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, is in the job, we might actually get somewhere. He has seen the need for a town of over 30,000 people to have this rail connectivity.

I acknowledge the work of the National Transport Authority. Only two weeks ago, it funded €9 million worth of transport initiatives in my town. I am very grateful to Anne Graham, Michael Aherne and others in the authority for that work. The Minister has previously praised the efforts of Meath County Council. I join him in acknowledging the work of the chief executive officer, Jackie Maguire, along with Des Foley and Nicholas Wyatt. The appetite of the people of Meath is evident. Meath County Council is doing an online survey with tens of thousands of people logging on every week.

Ultimately, however, the Minister and I know that the project will get the green light based on the scoring metric used by the National Transport Authority on whether it stacks up in terms of population. It is not even the population now but the projected population in 2070. If that metric does not stack up, the project will go nowhere. Before Christmas, the Minister described the case for the Athenry to Claremorris line as weak. It scored poorly on the National Transport Authority chart. It is possible, when the numbers are crunched and the authority presents the report to the Minister, that Navan will score highly, possibly in the region of 0.8 to 1 in the baseline.

This is where the Minister needs to back up that report and add that additional element, namely, human beings, the people who rise at 5 a.m. to get to work and have had many years of family life taken away from them. If the Minister does that, perhaps we can get that first train from Dunboyne to Navan central and we can celebrate together on the achievement of that project.