A transportation expert said there is a need to “think outside the box” in building the proposed MetroLink and suggested “something like an Olympic village” to house workers on the project.
Brian Caulfield, a professor in transportation in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland: “We need to be clever about this.”
The Oireachtas transport committee was told on Wednesday that Dublin’s planned new metro system, running from Dublin city to the airport, will need about 8,000 workers to construct.
Prof Caulfield suggested that “something like an Olympic village” could be built to accommodate the 8,000 construction workers, and that this could subsequently be returned to the State. He pointed out that a hundred years ago when the Ardnacrusha power plant was being built, camps were provided for the workers.
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“I think in Dublin for the metro, and it’s not only metro, we need thousands of construction workers for a number of other projects. We need to be cleverer about this. I think perhaps one thing that we could do is to look into building something that would be an asset for the city when the construction is over, something like an Olympic village, whereby the workers would be there and then that asset would then be given back to the State.
“It could be used for student accommodation, it could be used for housing, it could be used for many other of the needs we have for at the moment. I suppose you would find a plot of land along the metro line, because along the metro line it’s where we’re going to want to have dense housing.
“So if you had housing for say, maybe, five, six thousand people along the metro line somewhere, then when it’s handed back over to the State, it’s what we call a transit-oriented development, in that people have access to really good public transport once it’s handed back over to the State.”
At the Oireachtas committee hearing, MetroLink programme director Sean Sweeney said the largest contracts for the development of the 19km rail line, planned to run from south of Dublin’s city centre to Swords in the north of the county, would be with international firms that were expected to bring in some personnel from abroad.
“There are no firms of the scale or expertise in Ireland to run those major contracts,” he told the Oireachtas committee on Transport on Wednesday.
“They [the international companies] will bring a proportion of workers in and will be looking to supplement with local labour. We have done extensive Irish workforce analysis.”
The rail link has 16 planned stops and will run largely underground, through both tunnelling and cut-and-cover sections of track. It will serve Dublin Airport and several locations in the city centre, as well as the increasingly populous northside suburbs.
