Fianna Fáil is availing of the opportunity of this Adjournment debate to stand over the charges it made in relation to the light rail controversy. We remain of the view that the Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications, Deputy Lowry, has grossly misled the Dáil, Seanad and the public on as many as ten different occasions between December 1995 and April of this year when he deliberately concealed the information that in November 1995 he had agreed to an investigation of the entire light rail project by the European Union.
In a statement last night the Minister accused Fianna Fáil of being mischievous and of making allegations founded on a deliberate distortion of facts. It is ironic that in the statement he has engaged in the very behaviour he has accused others of perpetrating. In the four page press release he deliberately distorted a large number of facts and he also selectively quoted from the Dáil record in an effort to try to distract from his concealment of information from both Houses of the Oireachtas.
I wish to detail the Minister's distortion of the facts in his press release and then in his comments in both Houses of the Oireachtas. No matter what he now tries to argue, there is no doubt that on 12 December last when he was badly in need of good news to distract from his difficulties, he announced with a fanfare of publicity the light rail lines to Dundrum and Tallaght. He expressed regret on the day that the Government had decided not to proceed with a proposed third route to Ballymun until after the year 2000. He made no reference at the announcement to the EU investigation which was questioning this phasing and which meant that the funding for the two lines was conditional. It is incomprehensible that he decided to announce the two lines while a question mark hung over the project and the £114 million in EU funding.
We believe this raises serious questions about the Minister's political judgement and about the judgment of the Taoiseach who robustly defended his actions on yesterday's Order of Business. He claims in last night's press release that last December he only launched a public consultation process and that he did not announce the two lines. He further tried to suggest that this was a public consultation process about a general plan for the city of Dublin rather than specific light rail routes. This dancing on the head of a pin by the Minister is, unfortunately, laughable.
It was abundantly clear on 12 December that the Minister was announcing the two lines and that the public consultation process he launched was only in relation to those two lines. This is also recorded in the Official Report, 5 March 1996, vol. 462, col. 1181. At Question Time he said:
The routes have been announced. They will be made known to the public, and people who wish to comment on how a route might affect them or how it could be best placed or changed to accommodate the concerns of local people will be listened to during the public consultation process and also at the public inquiry.
The Minister moves on in his press release to quote from a Dáil question in January asked by Deputy Shatter. He quotes very selectively from the reply. All he gives of the reply is that "No final decision will be taken on the precise routes until the public consultation process is completed, until a public inquiry is held later this year and the EU approval procedures have been completed." Turning to the Official Report, 31 Janaury 1995, vol. 460, col. 1919, it is interesting to read the full paragraph. It states: "I launched a public consultation process on the planning light rail links to Dundrum and Tallaght on 12 December 1992 following the conclusion of detailed work undertaken by the project team to identify the preferred technical route alignments for both links." He goes on to say what I said in the previous paragraph. Again, it is clear that all that are in question are the Tallaght and Dundrum lines. No mention is made of the fact that two weeks before the Minister announced the two lines he agreed to an investigation by the EU into the light rail plan and the phasing of the project. He tries to convey in his press release that the EU investigation is a routine procedure; it is clearly not so. It is a serious development and threatens the timescale for the entire light rail plan.
The seriousness of this was evident when the EU Regional Affairs spokesman was interviewed on last Monday's 1 o'clock news. Mr. Tommy Gorman, the RTÉ correspondent, said that the Government had already announced what it intended to do. He asked the Regional Affairs spokesman if he was now saying that the Government, in November, had agreed to postpone this until after another study was done. The EU Regional Affairs spokesperson responded: "That is our information, that is what we have agreed with the Irish Government — to ask an independent consultant to analyse all three options and then decide."
This was the first confirmation of the Sunday Business Post story of 14 April which revealed that the EU had ordered an investigation into the entire project. Until then nobody had got wind of the development which had occurred on 29 November 1995 when officials at the Department met EU officials. This meeting, where the decision on the light rail investigation was finalised, took place just two weeks before the Minister announced the two lines.
Subsequently, the Minister made no reference to such an important outstanding issue. In fact, in the Seanad on 14 February he said that we could not afford the luxury of more studies to re-examine the fundamental basis of the DTI strategy which we recently adopted. On the few occasions when he referred to the EU he made it appear as if only the hoops had to be gone through with the Commission and that they were minor and procedural. In the Official Report, 28 March 1996, vol. 463, col. 1452. he gave the impression that the European Union had actually agreed the process when he said: "The Operational Programme for Transport, agreed by the Government and the European Commission, makes provison for an expenditure of £200 million on the implementation of the first phase of the on street light rail network as recommended by the DTI."
I call on the Minister to explain why he misled the Dáil and the Seanad——
