In today’s era of climate change, motorways are fast approaching their sell-by date

IT is encouraging that there is still one political party — the Greens — which will not acquiesce to the disastrous M3 planning decision, which has been shown to be flawed on both heritage and transport grounds.

Even Meath County Council now recognises in its draft development plan that “the current trends in transportation are unsustainable, in particular the relentless increase in private car traffic”. It says: “The council is strongly committed to the promotion of sustainable means of travel …”

Unfortunately, the council has also committed to putting all its transport eggs into the M3 basket, with the desperately needed rail on the long finger. This makes a bit of a nonsense of the worthy aspirations in the draft plan.