I am grateful to you for having given me permission to raise this matter. In the question on the Order Paper today I asked for details of the implementation of the Government's commitment to road proposals in relation to the Southern Cross route. Perhaps it was too broad a question to be dealt with in the confines of Question Time, and I am therefore glad to have this opportunity to expand on the problem and on the moves that are being or are to be made by the Government to deal with it.
It goes back to 1977 when on 8 June the Southern Cross route study group, an umbrella organisation made up of representatives of residents' associations throughout the southern part of County Dublin, received from Fianna Fáil in response to an official request, an undertaking signed on behalf of the party by Senator Eoin Ryan. The undertaking was very simple and it was given in response to the following question: "Does your party support in principle the position of Dublin County Council to reject plans to channel heavy traffic through residential south Dublin and to immediately construct a road on the agreed line of the Southern Cross route motorway to take this traffic".
Fianna Fáil responded, "Yes", there was not a commitment from Fine Gael and the Labour Party responded "Yes". Anybody who examines the commitment will see clearly that it is in two parts. The first involved the rejection of the plans to channel heavy traffic through residential south Dublin and the second was the construction of the agreed line of the Southern Cross route motorway. I wish I had a blackboard or a map to explain precisely what is involved. I will do my best without visual aids to explain this complex matter.
Basically, what is generally agreed to be the Southern Cross route motorway begins at a point slightly south of Firhouse Road and travels in a wide arc from there towards the sea. The sad fact is that since 1977 when the commitment was given, not a bulldozer has been moved into that part of the road alignment. A comparatively large amount of money has been spent by the Government on something called the Western Parkway. It was always envisaged that the Southern Cross route would link up with what is called the Western Parkway, finally avoiding the need for heavy traffic, particularly industrial vehicles, to travel through any residential areas in the south and west of the city, but since 1977, the Government have been doing their level best to suggest to people and to concerned public representatives from the county council and the Dáil that work sanctioned by the county council in relation to the Western Parkway is in some sense the implementation of the commitment in relation to the Southern Cross motorway.
I must point out that the Southern Cross and the Western Parkway, even though they will be joined up eventually, in political, geographic and engineering terms are two different things and that the implementation of one cannot be construed as implementation of a commitment given to the other. The present situation is that the amount of work done on the Western Parkway has tended to create a situation which makes the implementation of the Southern Cross route all the more urgent, and it is therefore all the more disturbing to the residents' associations that what appears to be happening is the reverse of what was promised.
Approximately £7 million has been spent or authorised since the general election in improving traffic flows in west County Dublin. The alarming thing is that there has not been corresponding expenditure worth speaking of in the south County Dublin area. What is happening in effect is that the traffic flow through west County Dublin is being improved, increased and diverted away from residential areas in that part of the county — a very good thing it is, too — but that traffic flow has reached a point when it will increasingly arrive at the Dodder at Firhouse with nowhere to go except through residential areas. That is because the Southern Cross route will not have been constructed to meet it.
In the west of the county, two parts of road systems, the Western Parkway on the one hand and the Belgard—Tallaght by-pass on the other, have been constructed virtually in parallel and are being constructed in such a way that will increase the pressure of the volume of traffic coming in the direction of Dublin south. If you go back to the original 1977 proposal you will see that it was decided to provide a link between the Belgard-Tallaght by-pass and a further section of the Southern Cross route which would carry traffic away from the residential areas of south Dublin towards Sandyford, with perhaps a spur to the Sandyford industrial estate.
A bad situation has been made even more critical because money has been given to construct a new bridge across the Dodder. Of course a new bridge across the Dodder is necessary, but the phasing of this development gives many residents of south Dublin areas considerable cause for concern because it indicates that even before the Southern Cross route has been built or any substantial steps have been taken to acquire the land, do the planning and build the road, access into south County Dublin by traffic coming from the Naas Road will be increased dramatically. Already it is a serious problem, first of all because of the growing industrial development in the west of the county and because of the growing and welcome industrial development in the Sandyford industrial estate. But to have all this industrial development without the provision of an adequate road network will create very serious problems. It has been exacerbated, if anything, by the fact that many of the juggernaut drivers — and who can blame them — now use CB radios so that whenever there is a hold-up on any of the larger residential roads which they are now forced to use because of the absence of the Southern Cross, they take off into smaller residential roads, terrifying residents and their children and turning into what I gather are known in the trade as "rat runs"— roads totally unsuitable for heavy traffic, much less heavy industrial traffic, using them to circumvent traffic hazards.
There is a point that can be made and was made by the Minister of State to me at Question Time today when he tried to pass the buck completely to the Dublin County Council. He said it was totally in the hands of Dublin County Council. It is of course true that Dublin County Council have an important function in this matter. It is also true that the elected members of the Dublin County Council have virtually unanimously supported the proposals made by Southern Cross route study group. The last time I am aware of that they took a substantive vote on those proposals they passed them by a majority of something like 18 to 1.
There are administrative problems in the design and execution of any project of this size. The elected representatives are putting the maximum pressure they can put on to ensure that any administrative, legal and other logjams are cleared out of the way as quickly as possible. They do not have any evidence that the same degree of urgency applies in the Department of the Environment and that the Department of the Environment are putting any pressure on the county council to ensure not just that the Southern Cross route is built but that the phasing and development of the Southern Cross route is carried out in such a way as to maximise the safety of the inhabitants of the area and not the danger to the inhabitants of the area.
Unless this is done what is going to happen is that all this traffic is going to arrive, coming off the Naas road at Newland's Cross, in the general direction of south Dublin and the bottleneck, in so far as there is a bottleneck, that exists at the moment at Newland's Cross will not exist any longer because it will have been transferred to the Firhouse Road. I do not know if the Minister has been along the Firhouse Road recently but the Firhouse Road in its present shape and state is so narrow that two cars and a bicycle cannot safely cross abreast on it. All this traffic is going to arrive on the Firhouse Road with no further motorway, dual carriageway or anything else to take it.
I think I can see what is going to happen. The pressure will build up for an immediate release of this logjam of traffic, and engineers and other people who like to have quick solutions to problems — and especially ones which do not necessarily cost as much as a motorway — may be tempted to take the soft option. The soft option in this situation would involve joining up existing residential roads like Ballyroan Road, Glendoher Road, Barton Road East and Whitechurch Road, on the one hand, and Ballinteer Avenue and Sandycove Road, on the other hand. All the traffic that the Southern Cross route study group confidently expected would be travelling on the Southern Cross route will now be travelling instead along these presumably slightly upgraded residential roads. There have already been protests on these roads at the volume of traffic they are having to carry at present. I shudder to think what the reaction of local residents would be — and I have never encouraged any group to break the law — if the kind of traffic volume that we see at Newlands Cross at present were to be diverted along the kind of residential roads I have described.
The final word in many of these cases of road development and construction lies with the Minister and the Department, because the Minister and the Department, in the final analysis, control the allocation of funds by turning financial taps on and off. By indicating to local authorities what the ministerial and governmental priorities are they can have a substantial input into the construction of a road network that will meet not just the needs and demands of local residents but indeed their own earlier commitments. The 1977 commitment, I have no doubt, was made by Senator Eoin Ryan in good faith. He took pains not just to sign it on his own behalf but to associate Deputy Jack Lynch, the then leader of Fianna Fáil, with his agreement in principle with the aims and objections of the study group. Deputy Lynch is no longer Taoiseach but that does not essentially alter the political mathematics of the situation.
As somebody representing an area which would be most gravely affected, from Firhouse all the way to Mount Merrion, if the Southern Cross route is not completed or is not substantially built in advance of the diversion of this traffic from the Naas Road, I have to ask the Minister what the 1977 commitment means now in 1981. Will he ensure that the work on this scheme is carried out in such a way as to ensure the implementation of the first part of the commitment given on behalf of this party to take traffic away from residential areas? There is a strong suspicion that at the moment what is happening is the reverse. If this is so the volume of traffic which will be going into the residential areas of south Dublin will, if anything, be increased. While I would not shed many tears over the fate of the Minister's party if they are perceived by the electorate to have failed to keep this commitment, in the longer term I would prefer to see the Minister's party keep the commitment and get the credit for keeping it than receive whatever electoral blows they might receive for failing to keep it, because in the long term the interests of the many and varied communities in that area are vital. If those communities are broken and fractured by heavy traffic, the danger is not just that they will turn around and wreak their vengeance on Fianna Fáil but that they will in some fundamental way be alienated from the process of political decision-making that we have at the moment. I urge the Minister to reiterate the 1977 commitment made by his party and to indicate how he proposes to ensure that heavy traffic will be routed away and not into the residential areas I have talked about.
