Time to stop investing in heavy rail in Ireland.

“A station on the outer edges of Moyross” is following exactly the decades-old formula you claim is being ignored, but perhaps you’ve skipped a section of that plan: First, add new stations to existing lines to encourage usage, then connect them to multiply the benefits. Limerick at least has a through-running rail link already, although I accept that could be improved.

I don’t see how you could classify the the AISRR as being about connecting small villages. The bulk of the proposals concerned inter-urban service improvements, and logical measures to increase inter-regional use of rail transport - that was the project’s remit. High-frequency commuter rail services were outside of the scope of the report, so DART not being mentioned means absolutely nothing.

The old excuses are not gone, unfortunately.

Back in 2011, DART Underground had been shelved about a month before the RO was granted - the filing of that RO application in 2010 was a real shot in the dark, but the extent of the damage to the economy was only partially known then, and as DART Underground was supposed to be delivered as a PPP, there was hope that the private partner could take more of the cost on. That turned out to be impossible, as construction companies were also going bust left, right and centre.

There is enormous blindness among the general public at just how much the domestic economic supports for Covid and then the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine really cost, but then, the true scale of the debt we took on after the 2008 financial crash also seems to be hidden by constant reference to it as a “% of GDP” ratio. All of this means that, unlike in 2007, we now have a huge debt we need to service: we will pay €5 billion in interest this year on our national debt (currently €170 billion). That €5 billion would have built the DART Underground as part of DART+. Back before the crash, our debt was less than a quarter of what is now - take inflation into account and the ratio is even lower - this is why we had such ambitious plans back then: we were genuinely cash-rich as a country, even if it all just turned out to be a scam (also not a surprise to anyone, but it’s amazing how many of the political figures who now always knew this at the time, publicly backed pouring more petrol on the fire back then). Back then, we also relied heavily on PPP schemes to deliver infrastructure: a method that has very much fallen out of favour, so now the government has to pay for everything up front, rather than palming off a lot of the cost to a private business that will then gouge charge users in hope of recouping that money.

I disagree with the NDP re-prioritising roads to the detriment of mass transportation, but I feel that the government’s TDs are already getting grief over those decisions, and the pendulum will swing back: There are 74 Dáil seats in the counties that DART+ runs through: no government can exist without listening to so many voters, and the voters are angry about this.

I also don’t believe that DART+ SW will be deferred until after DART+ W is running, although I never believed that they’d be build concurrently as some here seemed to.

There are multiple “AIRR maps” that we could cherry-pick until the cows come home, but the important part of the report is the recommendations, and the priorities that are attached to them. The things you are complaining about are all listed as low-priority nice-to-haves. The bulk of the report’s high-priority recommendations are for the electrification, speed improvements and double-tracking of existing, busy inter-city routes, and the provision of more direct inter-city routes parallel to lines currently shared with busy commuter corridors where the alignment cannot support additional tracks, plus measures to decarbonise the existing rail transport network.

My point about government finances is that things are still not as good as you think. You say 2014 was when we turned the corner, but really we are still turning it. We are still carrying a large debt as a nation, and it’s only hidden by constant referral to it as a percentage of the GDP of a buoyant economy dominated by extraordinary levels of pass-through income from multinationals - "33% of GDP" sounds like we’re doing great, but it’s a mickey-mouse statistic because it uses GDP. In reality, it’s about 67% of GNI* - and it is only that low because the government was paying it down in the late 2010s - COVID and Putin reversed that trend. We really should be running at around 40% of GNI*, but in 2007, we were at about 20% of GNI* - an extraordinarily low ratio. The fallout of our massive property-asset gambling losses in 2010 is still crippling the government finances, and we are still not in the position to spend that we were back in 2005-2007.

I don’t see a difference in the treatment of heavy versus light rail. To me, the light-rail picture is as bad, if not worse, based on the NDP document. I would point to the absence of even a mention of any additional Luas line in Dublin in this plan, and no funding commitment made to Cork Light Rail.

The original Dart Underground proposal isn’t comparable to the DART+ with Tunnel, as it was pretty limited in scope: basically DART+ SW minus the Phoenix Park/Cabra link, plus the tunnel; DU made no recommendations about the Western line, or about service extension to Drogheda. DART+ is a wider-ranging plan, and the usage improvements from DART+ will make the case for a tunnel irrefutable: the tunnel element of DART+ failed on cost to benefit, but I feel the benefit was understated because the ridership models were out of date: population growth and the potential for development at outer stations was not properly considered.

Nobody has said the Western Rail Corridor will be definitely be built except the local TDs who know their words will soon be forgotten. The NDP allocation is funding a project to look at the reinstatement of some or all of the line, and the first step is an investigation of the options. Reopening the entire Tuam-Claremorris link is costed at €200~500 million (about a third the cost of DART+ SW) although I don’t think it’ll be anything like that cost in the end. My own belief is that only Tuam-Athenry will progress to actual construction, and that would be pretty cost-effective as a way of providing a Galway commuter rail service.

DART+ SW is not cancelled, all that happened was the construction phase was shifted. I believe it will shift back, partly from political pressure, and partly because of the realities of tendering. The project is still under way in parallel with West; AtkinsRéalis were awarded the construction design contract for both the SW and W branches, and will bring both to the procurement stage. It’s going to be very clear when that happens that tendering both as a combined package will provide better pricing to the state than simply offering work on one with a promise of maybe getting the second sometime.

In short, the prospects aren’t as bad as they seem. There should be more done, but there’s no downgrading of heavy rail, more a reluctance to spend money across the board on anything that isn’t a road. That needs to change.

It’s not the media putting the pressure on. It’ll be the voters sitting in their cars for three hours a day, but also IBEC, the American Chamber, and all the other major business interests in the city, who desperately need DART+ or any intervention in commuter transport to solve their hiring problems. Right now, I don’t think anyone would relocate to Dublin given the cost of accommodation and horrors of commuting - that’s hurting businesses that want the best people working for them.