Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will pick up on the Senator Gavan made about the M20 motorway. It is important in the overarching transport infrastructure budget to recognise that the second and third cities of our country are not connected by motorway. That makes no sense from an economic and social point of view. Last Sunday, as people returned to Cork from the Munster match in Limerick following a disappointing result, they were frustrated to find that the traffic in Charleville and Buttevant was back to the old days. Those of us who represent Government parties, and especially those of us on the transport committee, have been very vocal in our support of BusConnects and the modal shift from the car to the train or bus. We have supported the initiatives of the Government - particularly the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton - around the light rail plan for Cork and the BusConnects strategy. To be fair, attitudes are changing around the whole issue of public transport because of the initiatives that the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has pioneered in government, and that is to be welcomed.

I was not going to speak this morning about the proposed motorway between Cork and Limerick, but I will do so now because Senator Gavan is right when he says it is an imperative that it is built. I know that the Minister for Transport has said that there is not a fatwa against the road. It is important that in the capital expenditure programme, we invest and we commit to investing. This is about the connectivity of two cities, about job creation, about people and about freeing up the lives of people in Buttevant, Charleville and other points in between. There was a documentary on RTÉ recently about the towns that have benefited from the Cork-Dublin motorway because traffic is not going through them anymore. It showed how Fermoy has benefited from the bypass. Equally, I hope Macroom will benefit from the bypass there. Even from a road safety perspective, the Cork-Limerick motorway makes sense. There have been multiple tragic accidents along the existing road. I know it is not in his brief, but I ask the Minister of State to ensure the Government commits to the Cork-Limerick motorway.

The other point I want to make relates to the comments that Senator Gavan made about health. We had a debate yesterday on risk equalisation. In the appropriation of money in the health budget, there needs to be a recognition that our population base is growing. In some places, bed capacity is not keeping in tandem with that growth. The shift to primary care and community care has not developed accordingly. When we discussed the Bill yesterday, I made the point that when we speak to GPs, they say there will be a waiting list. As I said yesterday, the lower age group cohort is coming in and the older cohort is coming in, and there seems to be a logjam in the middle. When many people try to ring their GP, they are told that there is a waiting list of four days, three days or whatever.

I want to make my next point, which relates to local government, very clear. We spoke here a number of years ago about councillors' pay and conditions. I genuinely believe we need to build on what we did in the Citizens’ Assembly on a directly elected mayor for Dublin by continually augmenting and supporting our local government members. We cannot put in place roadblocks to them doing their work, regardless of whether they are urban or rural councillors. They have a variety of different impediments in their way. The vast majority of them are working part time as councillors and full time in their day jobs. As we all know, the reality in the majority of cases is that they have to work full time as a councillor and the day job nearly suffers.