Many people are, understandably, using this debate as an opportunity to raise a lot of transport issues. I will do that in a second, but I would like to raise serious questions about supporting this Bill. I have a few reasons for doing so. The NTA is requesting an expansion of its power out of Dublin to the rest of the country, but there are serious questions. People hope that there will be good public consultation. What we have seen with the NTA is great public consultation, but it does not take any of the things on board and there is no accountability. I served on a local authority for 11 years. In fairness to the local authorities, there is public consultation, councillors are held accountable by the local community and public meetings are held. Local knowledge of those councillors and TDs becomes a factor in the whole situation, but that goes out the window with the NTA, TII and all the others. I will provide an example. A huge public meeting was held in my area a couple of weeks ago in respect of a proposal for TII, in conjunction with Fingal County Council and Meath County Council, to build a footbridge. There must have been 150 people in attendance. The footbridge was going to be erected from an open space in a quiet housing estate over the N3 dual carriageway to a service station in an industrial area. No one asked for this. There was no demonstrable need for it. There was no survey about how many people who live in the location in question work in the industrial estate. Obviously, residents were going to raise issues for safety reasons about e-scooters, e-bikes and all these things that can use a footbridge in order to get onto their estate. There was also the question of providing access to the estate that was not there before and the likelihood of antisocial behaviour. The visual and intrusive impact were also raised, as was spending millions of euro of public money on the project that could instead be spent on much-needed community projects. The irony is that the transport authorities are proposing – I have raised it with the Minister of State on many occasions – to take away a direct bus route from that area into Dublin city. They will spend a few million euro building a bridge to get residents to go where the new bus routes are. This is absolute madness. I do not know whether there is just a rake of money in a budget and it is a case of let us see where we can spend it or what but it is nothing to do with active travel. The best active travel would be getting people into the city centre who work there, which is probably an awful lot of people, and to their schools, etc. I am raising this genuinely because eight years ago there was a consultation on that bus route and hundreds of people wrote in. The Minister of State will have heard TDs from all parties raising this. It was just ignored. Will I vote to give more powers to an unaccountable body when local authorities should have much more of these powers, like they always used to? At least there is some accountability from local councillors answerable to their community. That needs to be considered much more. I will raise some of the other transport things that have been ignored continually. On BusConnects, there have been public meetings all over the place, including in Chapelizod and in Dublin Bay North. Does anyone in the NTA actually listen and respond to these concerns? The big plan for BusConnects in my area is to put everybody through the busiest shopping centre in the country, Blanchardstown Centre - it is also trying to introduce car-parking charges - to route all the buses through there and make it a hub. As has been said, people do not want to have to get off one bus to get onto another. Also, not everybody has that mobility and this is incredibly ableist. Nobody has listened. That is felt across the community. I am not happy to give more powers to the NTA to go around the country taking consultation and voting out of the hands of local councillors. I could go on all day about transport needs in Dublin West. The greater Blanchardstown area is not all of Dublin West but it is a lot of it. It is the third biggest urban area, after Cork and Limerick, but it does not have the transport we need. We do not have a Luas or a metro. There is a rail line but it is out of reach for people not in Castleknock, Clonsilla and Ashtown, which is a lot of the population. We have a huge number of multinational companies and people driving into the area every day. There should have been a Luas extension from Broombridge to Blanchardstown Centre. It is a greenfield site and would not cost as much as if it was diverted through a whole load of areas. It is needed for Blanchardstown, given the amount of industry we have as well. I want to mention an issue that is not in my constituency but that does relate to accountability and transport projects. I did not know about this until I came across it today. It concerns the proposal for the Navan rail line. Obviously, Navan is quite near Blanchardstown. The Dunsany Nature Reserve has informed us it would be split in two under the proposed route. It would be a loss of irreplaceable ancient woodland and mature trees. There are noise issues. It would disrupt a huge number of habitats. It has eight of the nine bat species found in Ireland, for example. It is an internationally renowned rewilding project. Books have been written about it. It would also have an impact on the rivers Slane and Boyne. People are asking if an alternative route will be considered. Everybody will write the letters but it feels like the power is more and more being taken from ordinary people. We write letters and get everybody to feed into the public consultation. Hundreds of letters go in and then the NTA, TII or whoever it is continues with the plan. Rarely do they take these matters into account. I would caution about this Bill being passed. I first became a councillor in 2003 and was elected in 2004. The council used to run the bins and control the water. What does it do now? All these quangos and ad hoc third party bodies are being created - the HSE, the NTA, etc. It takes political decisions out of the hands of elected people and hands them over to national bodies and the Government can say, "Ah look, you know, NTA took this decision independently. We have to respect it." Do not get me wrong. I am not saying that just because people oppose something, it is not the right thing. I am saying local communities and councillors who know their areas are being sidelined by the likes of this Bill, which is giving more powers to a national body to build infrastructure which, often, the councils used to propose. Then it would be a statutory public consultation, after which a vote would come back to the local council. I do not agree that we should be moving more and more in the current direction.

Sentiment score: 0.07