Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Last week, Councillors Anne Feeney, James Geoghegan and I held a meeting. There were nearly 300 people in the room and another 200 had to be turned away outside. The meeting was to discuss the proposed bus corridor from Templeogue and Rathfarnham to the city centre. Many of the people there have been given notice of compulsory purchase order of their gardens for cycle lanes and access. There will be huge disruption to their lives to enable commuters, when all this is done and €2 billion is spent, to get into the city centre six minutes more quickly than they can now.

There have been several rounds of public consultation on the proposals. Thousands of submissions have gone in on this corridor, the Kimmage corridor and the Greenhills corridor. Very little of what residents are saying, including cycling lobbyists who want safe cycling facilities and good public transport, has been heeded. Everybody wants good public transport. However, a lot of what has been said has not been taken on board. Now we are in the phase of involvement by An Bord Pleanála, there is a little hope that there will perhaps be some heeding of reason, particularly regarding the Templeogue proposal, before there is enormous disruption to very old villages like Ranelagh and Rathgar. The attitude shown and the plan in place do not reflect the age of the area and the impact on residents. People living on Rathgar Avenue, for instance, will not be able to get out either end of the road, depending on the time of day. A theory was imposed in the plan that does not reflect reality. When there has been engagement with the National Transport Authority, NTA, the latter has admitted its people have not visited the site to see the situation locally.

I have submitted Commencement matters on this issue and asked the transport committee to engage on it. I have called for the Minister to come to the House to be answerable to the fact all the residents' associations across these areas have sought an engagement on extending the proposed metro route. There has been no such engagement, with any consideration of a metro for Templeogue postponed to somewhere beyond 2040. People are going to considerable expense to figure out the impact on their homes. There is no way of supporting those families. The Minister must come to the House and be answerable for the strategy. There are fine bus corridors going in across various locations. However, there is a small area in south Dublin that includes very old villages with very narrow roads on which buses will be driven to the exclusion of anybody living in the area, particularly the elderly and disabled people. We need the Minister to take statements in the House on the public transport plans for south Dublin.