DART+ (DART Expansion)

No.

Any Intercity tunnel, which is not on the cards at all, would absolutely not terminate anywhere; it would be through.

Asking as I read this earlier...

https://www.irishtimes.com/transport/2025/10/13/irish-rails-new-commuter-plan-will-make-thurles-as-accessible-to-dublin-as-greystones/

The cork line trains comfortably travel at 160kph today, and an extra 20% wouldn't push the infrastructure that far.

Top speed on the line yesterday morning on my train was 162kph.

1990s to the 2000s shouldn’t be included here. People go on like nothing happened but we rolled out a hell of a lot of Quality Bus Corridors as well as the original Luas.

The QBCs were a remarkable success story, somewhat under told now relative to Luas. Bus use went up nearly 60% in 5 years and car use declined by nearly 20%. For some corridors like the N11 it was dramatic. I recall the big thing of people boasting about how much more efficient it was and how it was actually fashionable to get the bus for a bit. A lot of housing estates started to have people using them as unofficial park and rides (something not as prevalent today). It some ways I think this was harmful as it did give credence to the idea that the Big Bang solutions like Metro North and DART Underground could be delayed. There was a notable improvement in quality of life. Some of those upsides have been rolled back now imo as we never adequately fixed the inner city issues with our transport corridors and as the population grew, we inevitably saw more cars out on the streets and making places (like a Donnybrook) hostile to the bus again (and losing some of its utility). I believe though that at the time that it was transformative, just with a different badge on it to a Bus Connects today. Really Bus Connects feels like a way that the NTA decided to approach planning and capital funding in the post crash era, I think there is some discussion to be had as to whether it was the right approach in time.

Irish Rail certainly struggled at the time to get much done beyond Malahide/Greystones DART improvements and also Heuston/Connolly improvements. My sense is at the time that you had an aversion to CIÉ within government (see the RPA) and as an organisation they struggled in that new environment.

The late 2000s to now has been well discussed here in terms of the missed opportunity.

The funding on DART+ is what would concern me more. It hasn’t got attention but the Business Case is more out of date.

I’m no expert on construction but I don’t think it’s beyond what the State can do. I’d guess looking at the figures that there is about 30k direct jobs from those projects required. Bus Connects would you assume require mostly people already engaged in road projects in Dublin. There’s things rolling on and off. Intel had about 6k at peak, for example.

The funding/finance is my concern too.

There's very little construction activity happening at minute so hard to tell how quickly the industry would get saturated. I know a good few people flying out to Europe to work on projects, especially data centres, they'd be delighted to work on the metro/luas/rail electrification at home even if it pays less.

I presume that Coastal South is fairly straight forward too?

New sub-stations for DART W and SW, I assume.

A

Substations are all to a common design, are simple to build structures which do not encroach on the live railway

Had a little look through IE's response to the PC submission (not the submission itself, it is 54 pages and based on what I'll explain below may be… problematic), and my takeaways are:

• They objected to the location of a substation/OHLE maintenance compound
• They wanted it to be on the west side of the track/station not the east side as is planned
• All of the information the company was operating off of was incorrect/out-of-date, IÉ makes it sound like it was based on pre- non-statutory consultation information, meaning even then it would have been 2-3 years old.
• They had met with IE many times before the submission to ACP, and despite this their submission still showed that they still had little to no understanding of what they were objecting to and/or operating on out-of-date information
• They had also supposedly come to an agreement with IÉ (verbal and email) about how they will move forward, and despite this still submitted the objection to ACP and now the JR

It sounds as though their objection essentially ignored any changes to the plan that was made to accommodate them. They then gave IÉ the go-ahead before preceding to object to the plan anyways, and they have now file a JR application.

Ideally this would be the textbook example of a JR application to throw out. They have either maliciously or through sheer incompetence failed to engage with the PC process, they also then lied to IÉ that they were okay with it moving forward. Especially if the meetings were recorded or the emails are still saved, they should be laughed out of court.

I also am 100% assuming they are trying to look for an easy payout, and it wouldn't be the first business to file a JR to do so.

On the bright side, I do believe the window to file a JR has ended meaning this is the only one? Additionally, I think D+N does fall under the new JR rules? Which I think means there will be no need for leave to apply (may have butchered that term), but also that the grounds cannot be amended after the application, and important to my points above for an application to be approved the objector must have engaged in good faith with IÉ.

No way in hell should taxpayers’ money be used to pay off extortionists.