To understand why Michael O’Leary’s arguments against the Dublin MetroLink are so flawed, you need to go back 25 years, when the project was first proposed in the Platform for Change transport plan for Dublin. That plan was based on the most detailed modelling of how our city should grow. It showed that a meshed network of public transport, safe cycling and walking routes was the only way of building a city that would work into the future.
O’Leary’s argument that we should give up on rail-based solutions and rely on the car and bus instead makes no sense. We will need a huge expansion in our bus service, but on its own it will not be able to carry the numbers needed to avoid inevitable gridlock. It is not a sustainable solution – even if every vehicle is guided by artificial intelligence and powered by clean electricity.
The Metro will help us manage one specific capacity problem that we already knew about all those years ago, around the approach roads to Dublin Airport. Because these roads link so closely to the M1 and M50, which are the busiest roads in the country, they risk creating tailbacks that would clog up the entire road system. O’Leary wants the Government to just ignore the issue and undermine the independence of our planning system by scrapping the conditions that were put in place to manage this real capacity problem.
He argues that the Metro will not be used by many airport passengers, but every vehicle diverted from that approach road matters. His proposal to ditch the Metro and abandon the rule of law by subverting the planning authority would do incredible damage to our country and do nothing to improve Dublin Airport.
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Depicting the Metro as primarily an airport service is in any case an example of O’Leary’s myopic thinking. It will first and foremost be a facility for the people of Swords and Ballymun, for students in Dublin City University and patients attending the Mater hospital. It can deliver the meshed network promised in the Platform for Change plan, by connecting to the mainline rail network at Glasnevin and Tara Street and to the Luas at Charlemont, St Stephens Green and O’Connell Street.
[ Dublin’s MetroLink: How much will it really cost?Opens in new window ]
In the intervening years, we have also modelled where the second phase of the Metro will go. It is not designed to stop at Charlemont, but will continue from there to Terenure, Rathfarnham, Knocklyon, Firhouse and Tallaght, which are poorly served by public transport.
The project was split because it was too big as a single line, but once we have delivered the first phase it should be a lot easier and cheaper to complete the second phase. What we will have then is a rail artery connecting the north and south sides of the city, joining up with all the other lines and making the city work in a cleaner, more efficient and social way.
The final argument from O’Leary is that the Metro is now too expensive, citing the €23 billion price tag that has been put out there by some as the likely cost. Again, you need to know the history of the project to understand where that incredibly inflated price tag is coming from.
The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has always opposed the Metro, for what seemed to me to be ideological rather than rational reasons. It succeeded in killing off the project in 2011 despite it having planning permission, being included in the national recovery plan and having funding support from the European Development Bank.
The line also ran alongside large housing land banks the State then controlled through Nama, which were ready to be built upon once the Metro got the go-ahead. It was one of the worst investment decisions ever made in the history of the State not to go ahead at that time.
Unfortunately, the department does not seem to have learned the right lessons from that experience. It is now more traumatised by the cost overruns from the building of the new National Children’s Hospital and as a result is applying a new standard on the estimates for the Metro, which requires a 95 per cent certainty that no such cost overruns could ever occur.
[ MetroLink delivery should be prioritised, US multinationals tell GovernmentOpens in new window ]
International experts confirmed to me it would be far more appropriate at this stage to apply a 50 per cent probability cost indicator, which brings the construction cost estimate down to less than €12 billion. It is hard to believe the department seems willing to talk up the odds of an expensive auction process, just to save face should there be future cost overruns.
O’Leary does not help with his demeaning comments about the inability of the Irish State to deliver anything. In fact, we built out the motorways and Luas lines on budget and on time, just as we did with complex projects such as the National Broadband Plan and electricity interconnectors.
Our biggest problem is a lack of confidence and conviction to deliver at speed. That is not helped by hurlers on the ditch such as O’Leary. Sowing doubt, derision and misinformation only delays projects and adds to the cost to the Irish public in the end.
