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The Government’s National Development Plan “remains a wish list” without detailed timelines and costings, and has been likened to an “incoherent work of fiction” by the Opposition.
The €165 billion plan was published on Monday, but the Coalition has faced criticism over a lack of specifics on some key projects, including the Metrolink scheme in Dublin’s norther commuter belt.
“The plan lacks the detail in terms of costings, delivery times, priorities,” Social Democrats coleader Catherine Murphy said on Tuesday. “It remains a wish list until those pieces are in place,” the Kildare North TD said.
She also said the Government had “lost its nerve” on the Dart Plus project despite spending €48 million on it so far.
“Without costing those kinds of projects, how are we to know that the actual priority that’s give to public transport over roads will actually happen,” she said.
Pointing out significant growth of the commuter belt in recent years – Fingal, Meath and Kildare had grown by between 39 and 41 per cent, she said – Ms Murphy said: “You can’t have that kind of housing development without the comparable public transport investment.”
Ged Nash, the Labour finance spokesman, said the NDP was an “incoherent work of fiction”. He said it was “completely cynical” of the Government to publish the plan without “any kind of adequate costings outside of ceilings for capital expenditure in Government departments in the next 3-4 years”.
`No timelines'
On Metrolink and Dart Plus, he said there are “no timelines for those particular initiatives and no project costings whatsoever”, and that it was an “absolute obligation of Government to provide at least indicative costings and timelines”.
“Yesterday’s initiative contributes to the deep cynicism that already exists around politics,” he said.
People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said the NDP was “more pie in the sky from a government that continuously gives us plans, promises but delivers very little in the here and now on the major crises facing society.”
On Monday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin defended the new multibillion euro plan for infrastructure and said “it is not a wish list”.
At the launch of the plan, Mr Martin said that while a lot depends on a project’s journey through the planning and statutory process, the Government is committed to a large-scale capital investment over the coming 10 years.
Speaking at Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Mr Martin also said that housing is the most urgent and important social issue facing the country right now and that 300,000 homes would be delivered by the end of 2030.