Michael McDowell
National University of Ireland · Independent · Ireland
“Then I think of this particular Chamber where people are polite and kind to each other and listen to each other respectfully. There is no baying or shouting down or whatever. It is a great tribute to the Seanad staff that that spirit continues to exist in this House.”
“I note that the whole scheme of the planning Act is that exempt development proposals are considered by the Houses. It is questionable whether this House has really considered the exempt development regulations. Without debate, we sent them off to a committee.”
“I am one of the people who disagrees with the substance of that report. We have to have a real solid debate on it here in this House, not merely a cursory one. It is an issue of fundamental importance. It cannot be avoided, one way or the other. Whatever your views are on it, it needs to be thrashed out.”
“Although coming up to the end of this term we are rushing things through, and the guillotine is well-oiled and slicing this way and that, we have a lot of work to do in the autumn.”
“The people who did that were brought before the International Court of Justice and condemned and imprisoned. If Ireland does not clearly state that there are to be consequences for people who do things like what Mladić, Milošević and Karadžić were brought to account for, if we are incapable as a State of publicly saying that what Secretar…”
“If we cannot, as a State, say publicly to Rubio, "Hands off the International Criminal Court", when they were quite happy when the people who did the 7,000 murders in Srebrenica got their just desserts, but when there is any suggestion that what has happened in Gaza, with 70,000 innocent people killed by aerial bombardment and land bombar…”
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“That is creeping annexation by any standards, but it should not surprise us because this man has, over the past ten years, clearly indicated what the agenda of his party and the extreme right in Israel is. The coalitions that have been formed by Benjamin Netanyahu have been voluntary coalitions in which Netanyahu has escaped prosecution for corruption by remaining the Prime Minister of Israel. People talk about Israel being a democracy. What kind of democracy has a man like Smotrich in it? I will let the Senators in on a few things he has said.”
“I welcome the Tánaiste, and the substance, tone and inclusivity of his remarks, his identification with the occupied territories Bill and his indication of co-operation with those of us who support it. Senator Frances Black introduced the Bill, which was passed by a majority of the House in 2017. That happened in circumstances where the Israeli Government accused those of us, including myself, Senator Ivana Bacik, as she then was, former Senator David Norris and Senator Frances Black of being antisemites. I will come back to that in a moment. This morning, a gentleman called Bezalel Smotrich, who is the Finance Minister in the current Israeli Government, announced that the Israeli Government intends to create a further 22 settlements in the West Bank.”
“Where were the red lines that were crossed before? They are all forgotten. Our Government is right to stand against atrocity being the answer to atrocity, and it is right to call Israel to account for unleashing the most extraordinary atrocity that has been unleashed on any people before our eyes. Let us remember this: Hamas's existence was encouraged by right-wing Israelis. Hamas was encouraged so that the two-state solution would be undermined so that the PLO would be undermined. When you sow the wind, sometimes you reap the whirlwind but on this occasion it has to be said that if we were antisemites in 2017, those people who are doing what they are doing now are doing far more for the cause of international antisemitism than anything we ever did.”
“Israel is a recognised member of the United Nations, a country that styles itself as a democracy, yet it has Smotrich as its Minister for Finance effectively calling for the extermination of the Palestinians and their eviction. If it is a democracy, though, then the people of Israel share collectively the responsibility for what their Government is doing in their name. There is no escaping that and we have to say it. The other thing we have to say is to their allies in Washington - they have allies in Washington - and it is that enough is enough. We see Canada, Britain and France now saying that things have gone too far. They have watched for two years while this process started. They have been equivocating in their position throughout. Now at the eleventh hour, they find it in themselves to call a halt.”
“I identify with the calls that have been made for a proper debate on what is happening in Gaza. It is not unforeseeable. A number of us actually foresaw, almost to the detail, what is happening now in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-inspired atrocity against Israeli citizens. It was shocking that, when we supported the occupied territories Bill, the Irish ambassador was called in in Jerusalem and reprimanded by the Israeli Government. Those of us in this House who supported that Bill were accused of being antisemites. Nothing could be further from the truth and nothing could be more defamatory of us. For all of us who believe in any form of justice, just as we called then for the immediate release of all the hostages - and I reiterate that now - the same applies 1000% to the following notion.”
“There is a strong commercial push aimed at the suggestible and the young to consume these products. If the Government wants to accumulate evidence or to put flesh on the exploratory undertakings which it gave in its programme for Government, it should get on with it. There is a big Department of Health here. There is a HSE to run the hospitals, but the Department of Health is there to decide on matters of public health of this kind and on policies in that regard. If the Department of Justice can ask for six months, as it did last night, it is a bit of a smack in the face with a cold cloth for Senator Keogan and the others who have signed this Bill to say it will next come back before this House for consideration in 18 months' time. We could do better than that. That is all I want to say.”
“There is the suggestion that "Red Bull gives you wings" and all the highly clever, suggestive cartoons saying that drinking this product can get you to do things which otherwise you would not or could not do. That is a very strong subliminal message that you are missing out on something or that if you are depressed or feel inadequate, there is a solution and it is in a can, so go off and have it. There are also the sponsored events - young women and men with beautiful bodies leaping off cliffs into magnificent seas in Acapulco and all the rest of it - including Red Bull-sponsored events. However, we do not talk about the obesity and the people who would kill themselves if they jumped off those cliffs and who are affected by consumption of these products. Soapbox derbies are also to be seen sponsored by these manufacturers on TV channels.”
“The Minister, Deputy O'Callaghan, came in and said he wanted six months to think about it because there were things in the Bill which - I agreed with him - needed to be carefully looked at and a few corners to be looked around. However, the 18 months the Government is asking for now is too much. I have been in government. I know what happens if, 18 months into your term, you begin to address your mind to legislating for the matter and send it over to the parliamentary draftsman's office and get the heads of the Bill put before Cabinet and go through the pre-legislative scrutiny process, which was not there in my time, and the like. All those things take time. The real question is: is there a will to take any protective steps in this matter? I am also conscious of the nature of the advertising for some of these drinks.”
“I now regret that I did not add my name to the supporters of this legislation because the case that has been made by Senator Keogan and other supporters of the Bill seems to me to be a very strong one. Furthermore, I am of the view that given it is Government policy to go down this road, the question we really face this afternoon is one of timing. I fully accept the Government is entitled to assemble its own evidence. Maybe the particular limits of concentration of various substances and all the rest of it in the Bill are worthy of review but I was here last night - I think the Leas-Chathaoirleach was here too - and a complex Bill was put forward by Senator Lynn Ruane in relation to parole in the criminal justice system.”
“Would the material which was excluded from the purview of the affected person be amenable to High Court judicial review and examination as to its substance and weight? Would that process be entirely secret or would it be semi-public? Would there be redaction? No one knows. What appears to be a very simple precept of fairness carries with it very serious implications for the administration of justice and for a fair parole system. The Minister should take six months to think very carefully through where all of this might lead.”
“We need to consider their powers and whether they are entitled to test out the material which they have seen by, as I said earlier, bouncing it off anybody else for credibility, proportionality or anything like that. Are they to be given that right? If so, what are the consequences in terms of extending the duty of secrecy to them? If there were judicial review proceedings, and I can well imagine that there would be because so many people in this predicament have nothing better to do than to cook up a judicial review if they can possibly do so - I am not talking here about special advocates but, rather, the people who are dissatisfied with the outcome of the process - would those judicial review proceedings be held in public?”
“That goes to the point that the Minister has made and made well, which is that we do not want to create some kind of cathedral of complexity over a principle which, in Senator Ruane's Bill, is just a basic principle of equity, that somebody should have the right to know whether information is being properly or improperly brought into the statutory parole process. In that context, there needs to be further balancing consideration put into this project. We need to examine what the consequences are in the appointment of a special advocate. We need, in particular, to consider very carefully what sanctions, duties and enforcement there will be for special advocates and what penalties there will be for breach of those duties.”
“If they come to the conclusion that information is being suppressed, effectively, for the criteria set out in the Bill, are they entitled to initiate a judicial review or are they simply stuck with the outcome? There is not clarity in the Bill as it currently exists as to what the potential consequences are for what might appear to the special advocate to be an entirely unreasonable invocation of the confidentiality procedures that exist and what the consequence of that would be in terms of the entitlement to challenge it legally.”
“If we are going down this road we must, as I think the Minister hinted, carefully work out what the obligations, sanctions and rules are that would ensure the special advocate does not end up imparting this information either formally or informally to third parties, especially the affected person. Can they test it out with the third parties? Can they bounce it off others, so to speak? In so doing, does a trail of confidentiality, an obligation of confidentiality and a legal duty of confidentiality attach to that process? These are serious questions that must be considered very carefully. The second point, which I think Senator Ruane will agree is legitimate, is the question of what the duties of the special advocate are.”
“I welcome the Minister. I congratulate Senator Ruane on her initiative in tabling this legislation. The Minister's request for more time to consider what is involved is sensible and reasonable in all the circumstances. The whole idea of a special advocate is novel in Irish law. A series of issues arise in respect of restricted evidence confined to legal practitioners who are not in a position to disclose that material to the person on whose behalf they have been appointed to act. It is a concept that is well-known is European law, perhaps, and has crept into UK law too. However, let us remember that secret evidence is available in European law in circumstances that would cause most Irish lawyers’ eyebrows to raise to somewhere around the backs of their necks when they consider the very concepts. I wish to make two points.”
“In the PRTB, there is a statutory mechanism to try to have a single approach taken to a particular legal or factual set of circumstances as a general policy. We do not want to create a situation where one deputy ombudsman is known to be a softy and another is know to be pro-bank, or vice versa . We want some degree of predictability so that the ombudsman service in its entirety operates, more or less, to the same standards, the same approaches and the same policies in carrying out its functions. I compliment the Minister of State on bringing this legislation before the House. It is good that this House is dealing with legislation, unlike a certain other place where nothing is happening at the moment. It is nice that this House conducts itself properly in a gentlemanly and ladylike manner.”
“It is interesting that in the WRC, the adjudication officers' arrangement is that the presumption is that it will be in public and the exception is that only in special circumstances is it done in private. I would like the Minister of State, maybe on Report Stage, to indicate why a lower standard of presumption is being applied to the ombudsman's obligation to conduct oral hearings in public than is applied in the WRC. I fully accept the proposition that the role of deputy ombudsmen be recognised and that there should not just be a single office created. I am fully in favour of that, provided that there is some method of ensuring uniformity of approach between various persons looking at the same kind of issue. The Minister of State might deal with either now or on Committee Stage.”
“In this case, section 16 of this Bill inserts a new subsection 4A in section 56 of the principal Act stating: Where an investigation into a complaint made under this Part includes an oral hearing, the Ombudsman shall, on his or her own motion or upon the application by or on behalf of a party to the complaint, having consulted with the parties to the complaint and having considered the nature or circumstances of the complaint and whether it is in the interests of justice to do so, decide whether the oral hearing shall be conducted in public. All I am saying is that we are setting a different test here, whereby the ombudsman may decide it having listened to both sides.”
“However, it is notable that post the Zalewski decision, proceedings before a WRC adjudication officer "shall be conducted in public unless the adjudication officer, of his or her own motion or upon the application by or on behalf of a party to the proceedings, determines that, due to the existence of special circumstances, the proceedings (or part thereof) should be conducted otherwise than in public." That effectively means that the presumption is that these things are open to the public to see what is going on and, in particular, open to the media to see precisely what is going on.”
“It was found that people must have the opportunity to challenge statements made about them in these tribunals. We cannot have an adjudication where one person says something and the other person is not entitled to cross-examine or challenge that or bring evidence to say that what is being said to the tribunal is untrue. The changes in this legislation will not merely give the financial services ombudsman power to summon people but will also provide that telling an untruth deliberately to the financial services ombudsman is a criminal offence. In other words, people cannot lie with impunity just to get their side of the story over the line. I am interested in one aspect of this. I fully accept that unfair dismissals and rows between customers and banks are not identical.”
“The public are entitled to see and to form their own judgments as to whether some of the cases there are fairly or unfairly decided and whether huge latitude is afforded to some employees or some employers in circumstances that raise eyebrows on occasions, when we see the money being paid to somebody who has done something seriously wrong but nonetheless the procedures were defective. The public are entitled to know that that is what is going on. The same applies to the financial services ombudsman. The public are entitled to know what is happening as between a regulated financial institution and its customers and how it is being decided one way or another and to have some capacity to appreciate whether what is happening there is fair or reasonable. A second point arising from the Zalewski decision is this.”
“What happens there between lawyers, employees and employers is the administration of justice in a limited way as permitted under Articles 34 to 38, inclusive, of the Constitution. That is also fine. However, in the Zalewski decision, the Supreme Court found that if it amounts to a constitutionally permissible administration of justice by a non-court body, that does not mean that the affairs of such bodies can be conducted in a manner that falls below the basic requirements that people would be entitled to if it were being decided by a court. One of those requirements under the Constitution is that justice, in general, be administered in public. Therefore, we are entitled to know what the Workplace Relations Commission is up to.”
“I know people say that law is expensive, but previously landlords could go to a Circuit Court judge and get summary justice if they were owed €10,000 or €15,000 in rent. Tenants could also go to the Circuit Court if they were being unlawfully evicted. Depending on the urgency of the case, an urgent response could be issued. While this is certainly not the case with the ombudsman, we cannot allow arrears to accumulate in these tribunals, that is, arrears we would not accept if they were happening in the court. The Zalewski decision effectively meant that the activity of the Workplace Relations Commission amounted to the administration of justice in a limited fashion.”
“I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Troy. I indicate my personal support for this legislation. I understand the reasons he and the Department have been obliged to address the issue in the wake of the Zalewski decision as it applied to the ombudsman's procedures. There is a tendency now to set up specialist tribunals and to divide up what used to be the administration of justice and allocate them to bodies such as the Residential Tenancies Board or the Workplace Relations Commission, which replaced the unfair dismissals tribunal, the Employment Appeals Tribunal. Before that, it was accepted at that time that there was an appeal by way of rehearing to the Circuit Court. By way of general observation, the Residential Tenancies Board has many good features but it has one very bad feature, namely, delay. Anybody can game the system.”
“This is the occasion on which we can actually put in place measures whose cumulative effect will be to bring justice and healing, prevent suffering to a group of people who have suffered too long, and ensure that those who need those services and develop those conditions are adequately dealt with by the Health Service Executive in Ireland.”
“Unless a specialist skill that is unavailable in Ireland can be attained abroad, the expenditure involved should ideally be made in Ireland and the funds necessary to achieve it should be provided by the HSE. This Bill should never have been necessary. I know that the electoral cycle made it difficult for the Government to decide on the principle of the legislation in the run-up to the recent election because in May and June of last year, we did not know whether we were in an immediate electoral cycle and whether the election would be held at this time this year or at some intermediate date. However, this is not about electioneering. This is a commitment made by the supporters of this legislation and the Members of this House, who unanimously supported it. Nobody opposed it on the previous occasion.”
“Most children and most families do not really care where they receive their treatment when it is badly needed. However, let us make this point as well. The cost of 16 people receiving treatment at Great Ormond Street children’s hospital or a centre in New York was more than €5 million. That is a very significant sum. It is €500,000 a go. I have no doubt that is justified because this would not be done lightly, or it would not be done if an alternative service was available in sufficient time in the State. The point I am making is that if we are going to do it, either through the National Treatment Purchase Fund - which I do not think is involved very much in this arrangement; I think it is done on a slightly different and less formal basis – one way or another, it will cost money to do justice to those children and their families.”
“The combination of these two sections is intended - I make no secret of it - to give enforceable rights to people who are left waiting for years for treatment that should be provided in a more timely manner and which is not, for one reason or another, being so provided. There is a last point that I want to make. Section 1 deals with a service within the State but it is not the complete story of the Bill. Section 4 provides that "the Health Service Executive, where [it feels it necessary to] comply with its duty under section 1 to individual patients, [can arrange] for the provision of such services at hospitals, clinics and centres outside the State where for practical reasons the timely and urgent provision of such services at the standard referred to in section 2 so requires".”
“The section we are dealing with provides: The Health Service Executive shall establish and maintain a national treatment service for the timely and effective inpatient and outpatient treatment of scoliosis within the State at such hospitals and other clinics and centres as it may designate for the timely detection, assessment and remedial treatment of scoliosis for all children and adults normally resident in the State. That is a duty to be imposed upon the HSE to establish and maintain this service for timely and effective inpatient treatment. It has to be read in conjunction with the next section, which casts a statutory duty on the HSE to provide and maintain adequate resources for the carrying out of the service under section 1, a statutory duty which, if there is a failure, could give rise to legal remedies.”
“I cannot from a distance decide whether the Minister's suspicions, which clearly were shared by the Department because he would never have gone on a solo run by himself, were justified. I am often sceptical about a body conducting an internal review of its own use of allocated resources when it comes up with the proposition that there is “nothing to see here”. I find that slightly worrisome. I do not want to make a Second Stage speech.”
“It suggested there was no dissipation or misallocation of the €19 million that the Minister had claimed in public appeared to have been used for other purposes, but that it had all been used for the purposes for which the Department of public expenditure had authorised this increased payment. When I looked at the report of the internal audit function of the HSE, I noticed that the figure of €19.1 million does not figure there at all. There is a figure in excess of €30 million and a figure in excess of €21 million, but the €19.1 million that the Minister had publicly announced simply does not feature, and the HSE, on an internal basis, gave itself a clean bill of health.”
“Another point that I want to raise with the Minister in the course of the debate on this legislation, and the necessity for it, is what happened in her Department last year. We were led to believe by her predecessor - I believe he acted in good faith - that he had assigned just over €19 million extra for scoliosis-related treatments. His Department advised him, given he did not think this up himself, that it had every appearance that those funds were dissipated to more general purposes within the HSE’s activities. He went public on that and said he was going to have an inquiry conducted into it. I was surprised to see that an internal audit of the HSE was, in fact, carried out. It presented its report in October, before the general election was held, but the report was not published until after the general election was held.”
“I have a stack of individual testimonies by families who have waited years for their children to receive surgical treatment while the degree of scoliosis, the pain and the damage to other organs increased every year in intensity and while their mobility and their capacity to walk and do the things all kids want to do and all parents want their kids to be able to do was affected. I have a catalogue of the most heart-rending stories. I do not propose to spend Committee Stage of the Bill putting them on the floor of the House for drama's sake because we are not here in the business of competitive sympathy. We are all here in, I hope, a spirit of co-operation and positivity towards addressing the needs of those children, the needs of the family and the needs of the health service to cater for them.”
“The HSE probably does not like the idea of ring-fencing, just as the Department of Finance hates the idea of hypothecated or ring-fenced funds for particular purposes. I know it wants all its money, in theory, to be fungible and capable of being moved this way or that as the exigencies of service require. Normally, I would be sympathetic to such a view and conscious of the fact that, among people suffering from critical, long-term or developing illnesses, we cannot in principle have a hierarchy of suffering. Everybody is equally entitled to receive the degree of service appropriate to their condition but the obverse of that coin is this: there must be equality of access to services which are critically needed.”
“I am satisfied, from what I have heard, that we need to ring-fence the resources going into scoliosis treatment and the physical resources available to sustain 500 interventions per annum. That involves keeping bed space available in hospitals where treatment is available and not wiping out the programmes for surgical interventions because of surges or seasonal respiratory crises which afflict hospitals. An example where ring-fencing facilities has worked is cystic fibrosis. There was a time when cystic fibrosis patients were thrown in with everybody else and treated as if they could join the queue. If other people were in with a broken leg, a heart condition, pneumonia or whatever, then cystic fibrosis sufferers' treatment was postponed or bed facilities were not available for them.”
“The result of that is that, having spent maybe six months waiting for this appointment, they are told at the end of those six months that their child does not need surgery or a decision will have to be deferred. They wonder whether they are being treated to the standard which is necessary. The solution to that particular problem is this: we need a different pathway for scoliosis sufferers who are not in need of surgical treatment from those who are. They cannot all be bundled onto the same waiting list and treated, interviewed and assessed as though they were candidates for surgery by the people who would carry out that surgery. That is a fundamental point for the future. A wholly different approach has to be taken to scoliosis sufferers.”
“First, my colleagues in the Independent Group and I have received overwhelming support, not merely from scoliosis action groups, advocacy groups and parents but also from medical practitioners and specialists, for the proposals in this Bill. Second, not everybody who suffers from scoliosis needs surgical treatment. In fact, only a small minority of them need surgical treatment. It is very important to keep that in mind because it has two consequences. We cannot have a system where the specialists who provide surgical interventions end up having to act as the people to whom parents and children are sent for routine consultations, because the result is that sometimes these specialists have as many as 20 or 30 appointments with children and their parents in a single day. The result of that is they get about ten minutes each.”
“I welcome the Minister to the Chamber today and thank her for being present and for making it to this place after all her travels. This legislation is not some exercise in opportunism, nor is it intended to be part of a party-political blame game or a point-scoring exercise. It is simply a measure to ensure a tragedy which unfolded for very many children and their parents comes to a timely end and that the trail of broken promises, missed targets, disappointment, heartbreak and suffering for so many children and their families arising from the delays in the provision of proper treatment services for scoliosis sufferers should come to an end. There are a couple of points I should make.”
“Second, the early warning system in the Department should operate much faster and the FSSU should get involved much more quickly. The situation of the shock letter that was sent to parents threatening to close their school with effectively two weeks' notice should not recur. I thank the Minister of State.”
“I thank the Minister of State for her response. I want to emphasise that the Minister of State, as an educationalist, will appreciate that this kind of crisis should not take place. There should be an early warning system rather than a fire brigade action at the end of a period of time. My information is that the crisis emerging at this school was present for some time. I am glad to see that the FSSU has been engaged by the Department now to support the school and that the acceleration of payment of the particular funding has been put in place. Two lessons must be learned from this. First, parents should not be treated in this way under any circumstance. It is a terrible shock for parents to receive a letter of the kind my work colleague received.”
“I would have been shocked to receive it when my kids went to primary school. Everything Senator Ruane said about a vulnerable community with disadvantaged children makes it doubly sad that a situation like this could have arisen.”
“I thank the Minister of State for being here today. My involvement in this matter arises from a representation made to me by a colleague at work, a parent who has children in the school and received a letter warning him that, as and from 1 April, the school will close its doors and that the parent might attempt distance education. One can imagine what that means for working parents, single parents and the like. It would be a disaster. No parent should be confronted with a letter stating that they have three weeks to relocate their children. I note the Taoiseach was asked in the Dáil about this matter by Deputy Paul Murphy and indicated that, despite some delay from late November when the crisis became acute, something is now in hand. No parent should be confronted with a letter of this kind.”
“If we are going to do that, we should remember that all women should be heard, not just activist NGOs that have a particular agenda.”
“It is interesting to note today that the Government is coming forward with amendments to social welfare legislation to deal with the O'Meara decision. If we had passed the "durable relations" definition of family, it would have affected a range of issues right across the board. We were misled by Ministers at the time on the consequences of the votes. That issue has not gone away. Accountability for that misinformation should never be forgotten. If we think about them, vaccination programmes such as the HPV one are both male and female issues. The fact is that women are the people who bear the consequences of male-female issues. We should not segregate or compartmentalise women's health into an area where only women are heard.”
“There was a referendum in which various proposals were put to the people that were rejected in the round. I do not want to reopen those issues here now, but I do want to say this: the women of Ireland overwhelmingly voted against the Government's proposals. In that context, I want to raise the fact that the National Women's Council took a very strong position on one side of that debate but women generally are entitled to be heard right across the board. NGOs do not always represent the real concerns of all women, which include such issues as we are discussing here today. Misinformation was put out by Ministers at that time. I am glad to say it was not this Minister. People were told things that were untrue about the implications of what they were being asked to vote for.”
“I am very glad to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I welcome the Minister. The progress on women's health issues that she outlined in her statement is very encouraging material. I compliment the Government on all of the initiatives it is taking in this area. I want this to be understood. Women's health is not only an issue for women. It is also an issue for men. Men and women together are affected by women's health issues dramatically and sometimes tragically. We cannot segregate the consideration of women's health into a small corner where only women are concerned. Although this debate on International Women's Day is focusing on health issues relating to women, we should not forget what happened on International Women's Day last year.”
“They do not want to go to St. Stephen's Green or O'Connell Street or, in particular, to Dartmouth Square in Ranelagh as the terminus of this route. We are not going to proceed now with Luas for Rathfarnham, Churchtown or Lucan. All of those suburbs will have no Luas system because we have made this decision. I may be the only person who is deeply suspicious of MetroLink. I remain deeply suspicious of it because I regard this single line as a vast money pit and I do not believe it will be "transformative", to use Senator Clifford-Lee's word, of public transport in this city. I do not believe it will have that effect. It will have a very marginal effect and it will be vastly expensive.”
“The opportunity cost of going ahead with MetroLink is vast. The things we will not be able to do because we are making that choice are numerous. The huge improvement we could make in the capital's transport system is enormous and it is not going to happen now because all of our money is going to go into this single line from Dartmouth Square in Ranelagh to Swords via the airport. At the oral hearing, Colm McCarthy, an experienced economist, set out the very small difference it will actually make for passengers coming in to Dublin Airport. The amount of time a bus from Dublin Airport takes to get to the city centre will be roughly within three or four minutes of the amount of time it will take MetroLink to deliver passengers into the city centre. Most people do not want to travel from Dublin Airport to the city centre.”
“All of Dublin could have a comprehensive network for the order of €12 billion to €15 billion if we abandoned the very heavy construction criteria which were used by the engineers when the cross-city Luas was put in place. I just want to sound this warning. My public life will be well over by the time any passenger alights in Swords for this transformative-----”
“However, we also have to take into account that this €20 billion the State is being asked to invest in this single line from Swords to Dartmouth Square in Ranelagh is going to absorb nearly all the available funding for other public transport projects in Dublin. I made the point to the oral hearing of An Bord Pleanála and I reiterate it here now that even though the Government seems to be committed in its programme to Government to proceeding with this particular MetroLink project, that €20 billion, which I think it will eventually cost the taxpayer, is being earmarked for that project when it could have provided a network of very light rail surface transport, like the Luas system to Finglas which is now proposed, right across Dublin to all of its suburbs, such as Lucan. Senator Andrews mentioned the Irish Glass Bottle site in Ringsend.”