Deputy Cummins will not be contributing, so Deputy Hearne and I will share the time. I will take eight or nine minutes and Deputy Hearne will take the remainder. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this issue. There are many very valuable points made by Sinn Féin in its motion. There is no doubt the cost of motoring is a real pressure for households. Rural households are hit particularly hard by this cost. Where public transport options are limited or where they are not keeping pace developments in society, is also very problematic for some households. I will come back to that matter later. People feel trapped by rising costs. It is not just the transport or motoring costs they face in driving to and from work and school; there are also electricity costs and mortgage costs. Everything is going up and up. The issue of motoring costs is exacerbating the stress and frustration people feel. The reality is there are some structural issues that need to be addressed in the context of these costs for motorists. Unless we look at those issues, which have been baked into the system - and have been there for a number of years - we are not going to get to the crux of the matter. There is a real opportunity to look at those issues to see if we can somehow address them. One of the biggest examples of these issues is the privatisation of the toll roads. Year after year, motorists pay millions in tolls. The profits from those tolls flow to private companies under the terms of contracts that were signed during the Celtic Tiger era. These public-private partnerships were sold as a way to deliver infrastructure quickly, but the reality is that they have locked the State into gold-plated deals that guarantee private profits for decades. These contracts are a legacy of bad policy decisions, and ordinary motorists have been paying the price for them for many years. Last year alone, private toll operators made €234.45 million in Ireland. That is up by about €30 million since 2022. Every January, toll charges rise again. These increases are not about improving roads or services; they are solely about increasing private profit. Meanwhile, the housing crisis continues to push workers further away from our cities and towns, forcing longer commutes and higher toll costs just to get to work. This is fundamentally wrong. Roads are public infrastructure. They should serve the public interest as opposed to the interests of private shareholders. We need a serious conversation about how to unwind these contracts and bring toll roads back into public control. That will not happen overnight, but it must be part of any long-term strategy to reduce motoring costs, otherwise we will keep having this debate every year while private operators continue to profit. There has been quite a lot of discussion in the media regarding private operators, public entities versus private entities and how private operators are much more efficient and can deliver projects quicker and at less expense. This is the narrative that is coming from large corporate owners who are indicating that this is how we should deal with our infrastructure deficits. That is not always the case. This is one area that clearly demonstrates that. The reality is that when you are talking about private versus public, private operators have one thing in mind - and it is their fiduciary responsibility to have one thing in mind - and that is making a profit for their shareholders. They do not think about public good or about any of those other issues that public entities have to consider when rolling out road projects. The State should be delivering specific and fundamental pieces of infrastructure, and we should not be relying on public operators to do so. Ultimately, private sector involvement only costs the public more. Tolls are just one aspect in that regard. Fundamentally, what we need is people to have the ability to move away from private cars. In order to do that, we need a properly functioning public transport system. We do not have that as of now. We need a public transport system that is efficient, affordable, frequent and reliable. There are clearly still many difficulties with that, and it is not just in rural areas. Many people in rural areas assume that public transport in Wicklow and other places in the greater Dublin area is really good, but that is far from the truth. I want to talk about public transport in Wicklow for a moment. The rail system in Wicklow is not fit for purpose. I have been contacted multiple times by constituents who commute each morning from Wexford through Wicklow town and into Dublin and who are forced to stand for the majority of the journey. People are fainting on the train because the carriages are so overcrowded. That is completely unacceptable. There are only two trains on that line that will get people into Dublin for their morning shift. The conditions people are being forced to travel in are unacceptable. I have raised this multiple times with the Minister, but we have not seen any improvement. In the context of our bus service, the towns of Wicklow and Greystones are 20 minutes apart. However, there is not a single bus that runs between them. Greystones has the DART and Wicklow has the very poor rail service to which I refer. You would think the one thing that could be quickly delivered without the need for major infrastructural development is a bus that would bring people from Wicklow town to the DART station in Greystones. Yet, the NTA will not deliver that simple thing. How can we expect people to get out of their cars and onto more sustainable forms of transport, like buses, in order to make the journeys they need to make? They cannot do that. As a result, they are stuck in their cars and facing huge costs - including those relating to insurance, fuel and tolls - because the State has not provided sufficient public transport for them. What I have outlined impacts my constituents on a weekly basis. I recently heard about several primary and secondary students who were waiting for a bus that never arrived. They eventually got to school on three separate buses. They were absolutely soaked when they arrived to school late. That was just going from Greystones to Kilcoole. Obviously, there are many gaps in our public transport system. Until those gaps are dealt with, we are going to continue to force people into cars and make them incur incredible costs and pressures because of that. I wanted to pass that on to the Minister of State. I did not want to let the opportunity to discuss public transport pass, particularly as it is a key part of the issue we are debating. Public transport needs to be affordable, reliable and efficient.

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