Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I pay tribute to Senator Warfield. It is often not easy to call something like that out but he is a credit to the community that brought him up and rather than pulling up the ladder behind him, he is leading the way on supporting young LGBT men, women and non-binary people coming up.

It is a bit embarrassing to follow it up because I will be following up with the technical and local issue of DART+ and BusConnects, which are vital public transport projects we will see rolled out in the coming years. DART+ and the expansion of a rail line in Dublin it entails is a welcome development, if we are to reduce the number of people travelling in cars and meet our climate action targets. That said, it is bizarre that we are rolling out these significant public transport projects but leaving certain elements of them unfinished.

One glaring omission in the current DART+ south west proposals is the lack of a station at Kylemore. Originally, we were told a space would be set out for a station to be built in the future and as recently as last week, it was said at the National Transport Authority, NTA's, information session on the greater Dublin area transport strategy that it could be possible for a station at Kylemore to be constructed in parallel to DART+ but that was not happening as part of the project.

This is apparently because including a station at Kylemore as part of DART+ would slow down the whole project. We are not connecting the dots or adding up, when rolling out this vital public transport infrastructure.While the last thing any of us would want to do is slow down the roll-out of a project like that, the slow development of public transport and of stations for areas such as Kylemore, Ballyfermot and Chapelizod is unacceptable. We need to do this right. Part of that is ensuring that the public actually have access to public transport through having stations in dense neighbourhoods. Essential to that is having stations or stops nearby.

As proposed, there will be no Dart+ station between Park West and Heuston Station. This will render the welcome extension of the Dart line inaccessible to so many people who live in the area. The whole city needs proper access to the expanded transport system. I urge the NTA to make spatial provision for future stations in areas such as Kylemore in parallel with the project as it is being rolled out.

I also wish to raise the beginning of the BusConnects roll-out and, specifically, the new C-spine bus route. Again, it is brilliant to see the long-awaited expansion of the system but it will also mean that many children who are going to school from Chapelizod to Lucan and who are getting the C-spine buses every day will have to walk a long way around. There is no footbridge being built to allow these kids to safely access the new bus route. Again, at the NTA session last week, it was stated that it would be part of the Dublin core bus corridor development but it would not be happening for some time yet. Both of these issues speak to the need for a wider approach with regard to the new transport strategy and making it easy and accessible for people to use public transport in this part of west Dublin.