Direct Intervention by Dimas Sought regarding M3

international | environment | press release Monday June 18, 2007 14:27 by Brian Guckian

Legality of Irish Road Schemes and NDP Challenged

Direct intervention by EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas to be sought in relation to breaches of EU law by the Irish roads programme, including M3 motorway; legality of M3 and other road schemes, and National Development Plan, challenged

PRESS RELEASE

Roads Programme is Immoral; Legality of NDP & M3 Challenged - Researcher

Direct Intervention by Dimas Sought

For Release 15/6/2007

Transport Researcher Brian Guckian is to seek the direct intervention of EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas in relation to the Irish roads programme, following the decision by the Green Party not to seek its review, and the ongoing attempts to construct schemes in breach of various EU Directives, such as the controversial M3 motorway in Meath.

Mr. Guckian, who carries out research and development into sustainable transport and who has advocated expansion of light rail provision and extension of the national rail network, said that he had both a Petition and a Complaint currently under investigation by the European Parliament and European Commission regarding serious failures in the planning processes for four Irish road schemes, including the M3, and said that more would be attached to the existing complaints if applicable.

The central issue was the failure to adequately and correctly study Alternatives during the planning process for these schemes, which is a central requirement of the EU Directive on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Mr. Guckian said that Alternatives had been interpreted in an extremely limited and inadequate fashion, by simply examining alternative routes for the proposed road schemes in question, rather than examining broader issues such as provision of new rail links and coach services, restoration of railfreight services, and restraining traffic volume inflation.

Mr. Guckian said that research had shown there was no engineering basis for many of the state's road schemes, and that correctly spreading transport demand across several different modes, and following planning policies that reduced transport consumption, eliminated the need for very high capacity motorways on greenfield alignments. He said that transport thinking in Ireland was at least 40 years out of date, and that planners had been following failed methods from the 1960s, such as "predict and provide", where unlimited traffic volume increases and transport consumption were assumed into the future and simply provided for. "It has been known for several decades that these policies are unsustainable and irrational", he said. He added that the current roads programme was deeply immoral as it flew in the face of all current directives and practices in sustainable development and had to be fundamentally reviewed in the light of climate change and Ireland's failure to control its CO2 emissions, which had increased in the transport sector by 140% since 1990, as a result of these policies.

Mr. Guckian also said that the Transport 21 programme was in contravention of the 1998 UN Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters because the Irish people had not been consulted in its formulation. However though Ireland had signed this Convention, it had not yet ratified it, and thus Transport 21 could not be legally challenged in this regard.

Likewise the new National Development Plan contravened the EU Directive on Strategic Environmental Assessment which was transposed into Irish Law in 2006, because it too required full public consultation and participation, yet this had never taken place. Mr. Guckian said that legal recourse was possible in this case, and that several Challenges to the Plan were now underway.

Mr. Guckian said that Motorways were the infrastructure of the 1950s, created at a time when there was no knowledge of the impacts of global warming, oil dependency, energy inefficiency, sprawl, social severance, and loss of agricultural land. He also pointed to an economic study he carried out in 2005 that showed how car dependency in fact increased costs to individual motorists via tolls, fuel costs and rising hidden costs as taxpayers were loaded with the costs of environmental damage arising from over-provision of roadspace. Businesses also suffered, as these costs were also passed on to them in terms of higher commercial rates, charges, wages and transport costs.

Mr. Guckian said that the frequent assertion that motorways were necessary for economic development and for job creation needed to be robustly challenged. An influential report, Transport and the Economy, by the UK Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA) had questioned the alleged link between the two, and Mr. Guckian said that the true costs of motorway-building and car- and lorry-dependency were cancelling out any perceived benefits. He said that a conservative estimate of the total cost of car dependency alone to the nation in 2004, contained in his study, outstripped the value of foreign direct investment for the same year, and said that true value to businesses and society would only come from establishing integrated transport corridors nationwide, where the emphasis was on sustainable and energy-efficient transport modes such as rail and coach, and on re-vitalised railfreight services.

In relation to the M3, Mr. Guckian said that the former Minister for Transport had been made fully aware of the actions being taken at EU level prior to the signing of the contracts for the motorway, and that the Taoiseach and former Ministers for Transport and the Environment had also been sent details of an alternative, integrated transport solution, the Meath MultiWay (NTC3), back in 2005, which could also be applied nationally and which could still be pursued. "Anything is possible, irrespective of what people may be told", he concluded.

ENDS

Contact: Brian Guckian 087 9140105 railprojects@eircom.net