Kevin Myers writes anti-Metro column (x4) [SEE MOD WARNING POST #1]

By Kevin Myers
Tuesday August 17 2010
Dogma arrives in Irish policymaking like doctrinal pronouncements used to from the Vatican. Papal infallibility and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven were once upon a time foisted upon a credulous and obedient peasantry.

Now the imposition is of new governmental decrees, agreed upon by a cabal of politicians and senior civil servants, and pushed through regardless of logic, cost or intellectual coherence.

The latest Received Dogma to have taken shape within the corporate mind of the governing cabal is the insane €5bn Metro linking St Stephen's Green with Dublin Airport, at €277m per kilometre.

Of course, there is no real logistical justification why the unpopulated St Stephen's Green should become the start-point of an underground rail link to Dublin Airport. That is the way with RD: it requires no intellectual ratiocination. It merely is.

No doubt a clinical psychiatrist could explain this kind of decision-making. For virtually all governance in the Republic emanates from within 100 metres or so of St Stephen's Green. It therefore makes some sort of psychological sense for the main rail link to the airport to be close to the offices of the senior civil servants who are doing the decision-making. (Government ministers, naturally, even Green ones, will not use this Metro: they will travel by government cars to get to the airport). So the decisive issue is not economic but psychological, depending largely on the sense of satisfaction experienced by the tiny few making the decision -- regardless of the needs of the rest of the Irish people.

This, of course, is a form of governmental insanity, on this occasion driven by the Greens. And because it is insane, the Metro North project is immune to the many arguments that might be adduced against it, rather like Kwame Nkrumah's six-lane, 10km highway leading out of Accra to nowhere in the early days of Ghana's independence. Its primary function was to give its begetter the assurance that he was his country's leader.

Comparably specious sensations of leadership largely explain the otherwise brainless enthusiasm by the governing cabal for building Metro North, which is, even before the usual cost over-runs, the most expensive project in the history of independent Ireland. And all this, not at a time of boom, but in an era of unprecedented economic collapse. This means of course that it will be paid for by the grandchildren of those doing the decision-making: which is not the kind of heirloom that one usually chooses to bequeath to babbling babes.

Of course, there is a couple of "moral" explanations for spending such vast amounts of money. One is the Green's ideological addiction to rail. The other is Fianna Fail's pidgin-Keynesianism that says that billions on the Metro will help kick-start the economy. But every deranged potentate, from Caligula to Bokassa, finds some "moral" justification for comparable vanity projects, which all owe their origins to the psychiatric condition of those deciding to spend the money.

What are the cures for this psychiatric disorder? Well, they include the shock-treatment of electoral defeat for the three or four politicians responsible, which in the case of the Greens is certain to happen. Of course, no such therapy is available for the senior civil servants who are driving the Metro project. For failure in their world is always unpunished: the fine fellows who gave us half a thousand ghost-estates remain the inspiration to all decision-makers within the golden 100 metres of Stephen's Green.

So, the arguments that follow against the Metro project are unrelated to the largely psychiatric reasons why it was embraced in the first place. Firstly, Dublin airport is only 10km from the city centre: Charles de Gaulle is 30km; Heathrow 28km; Leonardo da Vinci 29km; and Madrid 18km from their city centres. An underground train link to Dublin airport is therefore unnecessary.

Moreover, only the southside-dementia of Ireland's governing classes would want to locate the transport hub on the far side of the Liffey from the airport.

The juncture of the Port Tunnel and the Dart line beside Harry Crosbie's Spencer Dock Development is the most obvious place to locate an airport bus station. This would have bus-only corridors all the way, unlike the comical bus corridors along the quays, and journey time would be under 20 minutes.

Such a project is clearly beyond the intellectual powers and administrative will of CIE, so the operating base should be handed over to a property developer like Harry Crosbie, with the bus services put under the control of a private haulier, such as Michael Gill of Dublin Coach. Five minutes with a ruler, a pocket calculator and a street-map of Dublin, and the two of them would sort out whatever problems remain.

Numbers going to Dublin airport are plummeting -- perhaps down from 20 million to 16 million in two years, just as it is about to open a new terminal with probably not enough passengers to justify it. A multibillion airport Metro, running parallel to an already underused Dublin Port Tunnel, is all that is needed to make this generation of decision-makers the most reviled in history since an earlier bunch of self-indulgers decided to have a civil war.