Flexible Work and Commuter Delays: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Paul Nicholas Gogarty (IND), Dublin Mid-West I live in the wonderful constituency of Dublin Mid-West, which has some fantastic people, but it is also the congestion capital of Ireland. That goes back to when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, sometimes with dodgy backhanders, were rezoning land on greenfield sites left, right and centre. They built houses everywhere with no facilities and infrastructure. Then, when we had a chance with strategic development zones like Clonburris, Sinn Féin, People Before Profit, the Labour Party and the Social Democrats accused me and others in Lucan, where we were trying to put in playing pitches, of being snobs and trying to move houses to Clondalkin instead when we were trying to move houses to Kishoge train station so people could walk down and get a train. We tried to put in measures that would open the train station before any houses were built. That was not passed, and the board did not uphold our appeal. As a result, the train station in Kishoge had to be totally revamped at a cost of €4 million. The car park that was at Kishoge train station is now gone for housing development, so they had to narrow a lane and put the car parking spaces alongside for the National Transport Authority, NTA, to permit it, and that has led to additional congestion. As someone with a green background, I know that the more roads we build, the more that cars are going to fill them. We are always going to have a congestion equilibrium but if we put the investment into public transport, we are going to have a lower equilibrium. We are still going to have people driving. If the buses are flowing freely and the traffic gets easier, people are going to start driving again - that is human nature. Now, we have the Government asking South Dublin County Council to rezone more and more land all around the county yet DART+ South West has been put on the long finger. BusConnects is a shambles. I have said before that the NTA is not accountable to anybody. The train service in terms of extra carriages is not being provided, but the Government is asking people to move into places where it cannot guarantee they can get to work. That is why we need flexibility in terms of working hours. It is so people can bring their kids to school or try to find a crèche, if they are lucky enough to bring their kids to a crèche as well. We need more investment, and we need more flexibility. We also need a change in industrial policy. I mentioned before that in one estate in my constituency, 90% of the people who are paying top dollar for those houses are not from Ireland. They are from abroad. They are working and paying taxes and contributing here. The issue is, though, that they have not grown up in the area. People who have grandparents who could help mind their kids are being priced out of the market. Meanwhile, software companies are saying they want to go to Dublin. There are rural areas that could do with kids in schools and with the added investment and the industrial policy has not been firm enough to say that if people want to set up their software company, they can set it up with the broadband hubs in rural areas. Keep the population and keep the post offices and banks open. The entire spatial strategy in this country is for the birds. We need a new town in the midlands that is designed properly. We need to redesign city living and build right up in Dublin city centre in order that people can walk around and go to the shops. We need to bring in all the public sector workers, including gardaí, by giving them incentives to live and work in the city centre. We must stop building out in the suburbs unless we can guarantee the infrastructure is there. In fact, the infrastructure situation is getting worse. In Adamstown, Clonburris and other areas like them, residents are now being given restricted parking spaces. They are told there are 0.75 spaces per unit because this is an area with active travel initiatives, a public transport hub, etc., except it is not. The 15-minute cities will be 50-minute ghettos in 20 years' time because people will not be able to get out of the place if they have a car and they might not be able to have a car because there is nowhere to park it. Three lads renting a house, say, and trying to get from A to B across the city cannot get on a train in the first place and have nowhere to park a vehicle. We need to rethink the whole thing and think a little more cleverly. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-21/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-31T01:00:51+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-21