I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill because it affords me the chance to put on the record some concerns I have, which I believe can be addressed through amendments to the Bill in relation to sustainable transport planning in the Drogheda area, an area that the Minister is very familiar with. In his remarks, the Minister referred to the fact that this particular legislation aligned with the overall objective to ensure that the NTA managed transport initiatives into the future in Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford, and that is commendable. However, there is one area missing from that ambition, and that is Drogheda. Drogheda is, as the Minister will be aware, one of the fastest growing parts of the country. It is Ireland's next city. The population of the "metropolitan", if I can describe it as such, Drogheda area is the same, if not more, than the population of Waterford at this moment in time and it is being left behind. I will be proposing an amendment to include Louth in the greater Dublin area, GDA, for the purposes of transport planning to ensure that transport can be planned in a much more sustainable fashion than has hitherto been the case in the area that I represent. The Minister might ask what the point of that is. The point is as follows. The Minister will know that, last week, a welcome announcement was made about the establishment of two new train stations in Navan. That is required. We need to get people out of cars, onto train lines and into the city for work, and vice versa as well in getting people from Dublin to Navan to work. Nobody can quibble with that. However, the Minister will be aware that Drogheda has only one train station and the north side of Drogheda is one of the most rapidly growing areas of this country. The Minister will be aware that several thousand new homes are being built there as we speak, a couple of thousand have been built already, and there is a strong argument for a north Drogheda train station on the main Belfast-to-Dublin line but the Minister, the NTA and Irish Rail are playing a game of pass the parcel. The National Transport Authority says it has no responsibility for this because Drogheda is not in the greater Dublin area for the purposes of transportation strategy. The NTA has regard to the GDA plans and Drogheda's connection with Dublin from a commuter point of view but it does nothing about it that really matters. The NTA says it is the Minister's responsibility to develop a train station on the north side of Drogheda. I merely asked the National Transport Authority whether it would develop a business case because I believed in evidence-based planning for initiatives such as this, but the NTA refused to do it because it said that the area was not in the GDA and it was a matter for the Minister. As for Irish Rail, I met the CEO a couple of weeks ago. She said that she would like to see something like this happen but it was matter, of course, of funding and prioritisation in terms of Irish Rail's strategy. We have a game of pass the parcel. Nobody is taking responsibility. The Minister is not taking responsibility for it, the NTA is not taking responsibility for it, and Irish Rail says it would like to do something about it but nobody is directing the company. This project, which is absolutely necessary for the area, is an orphan project. It is nobody's child, and a situation where we have one of the fastest growing urban areas in the country poorly serviced by rail services is not the way we should be managing the sustainable development of our transport infrastructure in this country. I have been listening to this excuse for years now from the National Transport Authority, really since the agency was set up and the Dublin Transportation Office changed, etc. It seems that, from the point of view of planning such as this, the NTA really is just the Dublin Transportation Office with a different label. The Minister knows the relationship of Louth and Dublin in terms of commuters. He knows how important that is. We need to plan that sustainably and we need to deliver the new train station. We need to find a way to do that.

Sentiment score: 0.11