Rose Conway-Walsh urges delivery of Western Rail Corridor

Firstly, I want to thank all of my own colleagues, Darren O'Rourke and others from rural constituencies who have worked on bringing this motion forward and I think, like others and others across the party, the shock of reading the National Development Plan and realising that the map that Deputy McLaughlin talked about wasn't going to change under the National Development Plan and I want to thank all other speakers who have spoken tonight as well. I have listened to everybody's contribution intently and rarely has there been such consensus across the Dáil as to what we need to do. So we have to examine who is in government and who has the ability to deliver the things that we have agreed on here tonight and I would appeal to the colleagues or the deputies within government to go back to go back to the heads of your party and to make them understand that you are the TDs who are elected to this Dáil. The senior civil servants with the pen and the paper, they aren't elected to this Dáil and we are the people who are accountable to people who vote for us across the constituencies. Because the key pieces of infrastructure that we talk about here tonight form the vision for rural Ireland, they are the catalyst for development, they are the things that we absolutely need. There are wonderful, bright people across the board in rural Ireland. We talked about some of them here tonight who were here like Monsignor Horne that Deputy Caleri referred to and indeed Micheál McGrail and Colman O'Rachalé and many, many others in business and communities across rural Ireland who have the vision and share the vision and the commitment to making rural Ireland work for us all. Indeed to make the country work for us all, but they are being blocked and we need to unblock what is happening here. We need to challenge the analysis that is presented to us sometimes, whether that is presented to us from an auditor or from a senior civil servant. And we need to show people who is in charge here because some of the cost benefit analysis, all of you know, we can make a cost benefit analysis, say whatever we want to say, depending on the criteria that we use, we can predict the outcome. And the population led cost benefit analysis that has been used across the board just will not work for rural Ireland in terms of the investment decisions that need to be made. People in rural Ireland want to do their bit for climate change. In fact, they want to do more than their bit for climate change. They want to be leaders in climate change, whether it be wind energy, wave energy and many, many other things. But we cannot do it unless you give us the basic infrastructure like public transport. The Atlantic Economic Corridor sets out a vision for us all in where we need to be along the Atlantic and the potential that is there. But again, they cannot do it without the key infrastructure that we need in it. And that is why an awful lot of these communities and businesses think that this government is out of touch, or know that the government is out of touch in how they think, in what they want and what they need to make their areas work. And they want more than launches and brochures and photos. They want more than that and they expect post-COVID to have more than that delivered for them. The Western Rail Corridor is a shovel-ready project with 10 years of very hard work has been put into it. Dr. John Bradley has concluded all of that work with the report that he forwarded. It makes economic sense, it makes social sense, it makes climate change sense in terms of freight, in terms of passengers, in terms of what we want to deliver for the West. And all politicians, the vast majority of politicians across this House agree that it needs to be delivered. We need to address that implementation deficit and we need to get it delivered. And that really would show the intent of this government that they are listening to the people in rural Ireland and to the West of Ireland. So I will ask again that this government would go back and would look at the Western Rail Corridor and deliver it, along with the other key infrastructure projects that have been talked about here tonight. Go raibh magad. So, thank you very much.