The Green Party has criticised remarks by Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey that a proposed outer orbital route around Dublin would be environmentally justified.

Green Party transport spokesman Ciarán Cuffe accused the Minister of "promoting" the outer orbital route, about which he said the Greens "have serious reservations".

Asked if his party leader, Minister for the Environment John Gormley, shared his concerns, Mr Cuffe said the party "was of one mind on the issue".

Mr Cuffe said the core issue was the delivery of public transport such as the Navan rail line which is in the Transport 21 strategy, over issues such as the outer orbital motorway, which was not.

"I would seriously question Minister Dempsey's claims that the orbital route is justified from an environmental point of view.

"If any infrastructure projects should be fast-tracked for economic or environmental reasons they should be projects focused on public transport, not additional motorways" he insisted.

"I will be discussing this issue with my party colleagues in the coming days, but at this stage I am very concerned that the transport Minister's concerns are very much focused in this [ road building] direction" he said.

Ireland's transport related greenhouse gas emissions grew by 140 per cent between 1990 and 2004, according to Mr Cuffe, a factor which he put down largely to the expansion of the national car fleet and the motorways.

But he said most people now accepted that they could not drive their way out of the "emissions crisis" which Ireland faces.

Attempts to contact a spokesman for Mr Gormley were unsuccessful yesterday.

A spokeswoman for Mr Dempsey said the Minister would be out of the country until today. But she said Mr Dempsey had never committed himself or the Government to building the outer orbital ahead of public transport plans - or even committing the Government to building the road at all.

She said the Minister had given an opinion, while the Programme for Government had merely noted an agreement to "prepare for the delivery" of the route.

Speaking last week, Mr Dempsey said he was in favour of the planned Drogheda-Trim- Naas orbital route around Dublin.

The proposed motorway would begin south of Drogheda, where it would facilitate the development of Bremore Port, linking into the M1 motorway.

It would then travel southwest towards Trim, and south to the Kilcullen M7/M9 motorway junction.

Access to Naas would be along the existing M7. There would, however, be no extension of the route into Co Wicklow as the Wicklow Mountains would present a large engineering and environmental problem.

The current estimate of the cost of the route is about €2 billion.

Mr Dempsey has recently been given a report on the route by the National Roads Authority which had been asked to prepare the the document by the previous government.

Commenting on the report, Mr Dempsey said the route was extremely important and could considerably lessen traffic congestion on other heavily travelled routes such as the M50.

Such a move would have economic and environmental benefits, he argued.

According to Transport 21, the first phase of the reopening of the Navan railway line, to Clonsilla in north Dublin, would be open by 2009, while the Navan link would open by 2010.

In contrast the development of an outer orbital is not in the Transport 21 timeframe.

Tim O'Brien

© 2007 The Irish Times