The greater Dublin region is grinding to a halt. If you stand on any bridge on the M50 in the morning and look north or south, a stationary line of cars stretches out as far as the eye can see. The cost of congestion is going to reach €1.5 billion by 2040. Dublin is ranked the worst capital in Europe in terms of time and money wasted because of traffic congestion. Incredibly, studies show that the average speed of a car is now 12 km/h. That is slower than the horse-drawn carriages of the 19th century, believe it or not.

Hundreds of thousands of people in this region are living in a commuter hell. Many parents are leaving before 6 a.m. and are not back until 7 p.m. in the evening. They are lucky if they get time to even put their kids to bed. I have no doubt this is leading to the anxiety that many children are experiencing because they are separated from their families for so long. Volunteerism is also dying in many of the commuter hell areas because people have so little energy when they come back from their commute to be able to help in community activities.

Traffic congestion in the greater Dublin area is grinding people down. A return journey for tens of thousands of people in Meath is taking four and a half hours daily, and it is approaching five hours. If we think about it, that is 20 hours a week commuting for a 40-hour working week. Meath is the biggest commuter county in the country, the only county in the country where the majority of workers leave the county every day to go to work. There are 90,000 commuters, 60,000 of whom are forced to use cars because of the lack of public transport. Navan is the biggest town in the country without a rail line.

In 1994, Fianna Fáil's Noel Dempsey promised to build the rail line from Navan to Dublin. Now, Deputy Aisling Dempsey, his daughter, is promising the rail line. The promise is now intergenerational. It is incredible. The current delivery, from concept to completion, is 42 years. That means that a person starting work in their early 20s, when it was announced, will have retired and be drawing the pension before it is actually delivered. In 1862, the same rail line was built in a matter of three years with picks and shovels.

Yesterday, we saw the launch of the national development plan review. There was one mention of the Navan to Dublin rail line, with no mention of any development that would progress it faster and no ring-fenced funds for it. Bizarrely, there was a mention of building the stations on a line where it has not even been decided what direction the line will go.

On Thursday, 4 December, there will be a public meeting of the Meath on Track campaign in Meath. All I am asking the Tánaiste to do at this time is to ask the senior transport Minister to listen to the people of Meath and the frustration in the country around this issue and to attend that meeting and listen to exactly how it is affecting so many people in Meath. Will the Tánaiste commit to that here today?

If I start making diary commitments for the Minister for Transport on the floor of the Dáil, I will find myself in a peculiar situation.

I will certainly pass on the Deputy's request as I am sure the Deputy will be in touch with the Minister's office also. I live in a county not too dissimilar to the Deputy's in relation to commuter issues. I do take the point that far too many people are spending far too long sitting in traffic. I take the societal points the Deputy makes about the impact it is having on quality of life, childcare arrangements and a whole variety of other things, including emissions in terms of people sitting in traffic. I want to directly address the transport issues but we also need to have a really integrated conversation around work in the 21st century. It is why the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, and the Minister, Deputy Peter Burke, are leading the consultation on remote working. There is this idea that people have to sit in their car five days a week and travel for hours on end. Not everybody, but some people can successfully work in their community in remote working hubs, connected hubs or indeed in their homes. This can work for some businesses and some public services. I look forward to the outcome of that consultation.

Yesterday the Ministers with responsibility for transport announced the Department of Transport capital ceilings for 2026 to 2030. The Deputy will acknowledge that by any yardstick it is a very significant increase in investment. There is a breakdown in that for active travel, public transport, road networks, road safety, civil aviation, maritime transport safety and ICT. The Deputy will also note that in that, the largest budget for 2026 is in respect to €1.6 billion for the road network, closely followed by €1.4 billion for public transport, rising to €2 billion in 2027, €2.5 billion in 2028, €2.3 billion in 2029 and €1.9 billion in 2030.

Specifically on the issue of the Navan rail line, which I know is very important in the Deputy's constituency, the NTA's transport strategy for the greater Dublin area does set out a framework for transport investment over the 20-year period from 2022 to 2042. The issue of a rail connection between Dublin and Navan was re-examined as part of the development. The re-examination supported the development of a rail line from Dublin to Navan so it is a fact that it is required. The final strategy includes delivery of the line subject to the various planning and funding approvals. In 2024, the NTA did allocated funding to Iarnród Éireann for the establishment of a design team to commence work on the Navan rail line project. This work involves route option selection, and planning and design phases of the project. Iarnród Éireann commenced the procurement process for the pre-construction phase of the project and issued a tender to pre-qualified consultants at the end of May of last year. In November of last year, about a year ago, multidisciplinary consultants RPS were appointed by Iarnród Éireann for the duration of the project to work with the rail company's in-house project team. It is anticipated that a public consultation on the route options will now take place next year. That process will ultimately recommend the defined route and then allow the project to move forward to the business case stage, which will require it being approved in line with infrastructure guidelines as well. As the Deputy said, the Navan rail line is mentioned in the NDP, under a sectoral implementation plan. We had a debate earlier about what is and is not mentioned. This is mentioned in the plan. We are committed to the delivery of it.

I make one final point. The Deputy refers to times gone past and I know he has a view on this too. In times gone past, I do reckon there was an awful lot less around regulatory, planning, delays and likes as well.

No landlords.

We do need to see how we streamline that for important capital projects.

The Tánaiste mentioned a number of stages in a multi-stage process. Each of those stages is taking longer than it actually took to build it in the 1860s with picks and shovels.

By the landlords.

The national development plan review means very little. At best it is talking about the rail line being delivered by 2036 but there is already a landowner talking about taking a judicial review against it, which is going to blow that out of the water. This project is in reverse. We were told we were going to have the railway order in 2026 and now it is being pushed back to the end of 2027. The Government has increased the budget, I agree, but those come after this country being second from the bottom in Europe for ten years in terms of infrastructural spend. All the money the Government pushes on this does not matter unless it fixes the disaster in terms of infrastructure builds. Under this Government, we have the slowest planning, permitting, licensing, tendering and judicial review systems in the European Union.

The response to the workers who are stuck in traffic is to hike up their tolls and fuel taxes. Some people in Meath are suggesting a toll strike, refusing to pay tolls on the roads. Some are suggesting they block traffic in Dublin in the same way traffic is being blocked for them on a daily basis. I am against that disruption. Rather than going to those lengths, the Tánaiste must do his best to see if he can get a senior Minister or public servant in the room in Navan on Thursday week, to listen to the people on the crisis they are going through.

I generally believe it is very important for public officials to listen and engage, including those who have responsibility for the delivery of the projects in terms of the various agencies. I am sure if the Deputy reaches out to the Minister's office, he can engage with him. I am sure he has done so. I will certainly pass this on as well. I am in a point of agreement. First, I disagree with the idea that the project is going backwards. I very much believe it is moving forward. That is why it is in our national development plan, and the investment plan of yesterday. We will go to consultation on the preferred route in 2026. I think that is progress. I agree with the Deputy on the diagnosis of the challenge in terms of how we streamline infrastructure delivery. The Deputy will remember from our debates on these issues that I ran an election campaign where my party heavily advocated for the need for a Department of infrastructure in our programme for Government. We got a division in the Department of public expenditure and reform on infrastructure delivery. We are going to see the outworkings of that, probably next week and certainly within the next two weeks in terms of how we can streamline processes. As Minister for Finance, I believe funding will not be the major challenge in the delivery of those capital projects. It will be timelines and making sure we can look at running some processes in parallel rather than waiting meekly for this to end, and then this and so on. There are more gates here than you would see in many country estates. We need to look at how we can reduce that as well.