Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I would love to see it started in the next year or two. I will give my experience here. I have been involved in the Dublin metro project dating back to 1997. I was a member of the advisory committee of the then Dublin Transportation Office, which started in 1997 and by 1999 had a clear plan and a brilliant model to show that it did make sense. A Platform for Change was the then plan.

Then the engineers on the advisory council told us that whatever we do we should build the metro first before we widen the M50. We widened the M50 first. By 2008 or 2009 it was back on track. I was in government at the time and I was particularly interested in the project given my history. Even though we were in the middle of the worst recession that ever hit the country and the budget was difficult, we made a commitment towards it. We included it in the four-year plan in 2010 in the middle of the crisis. We secured €500 million in European Investment Bank funding. If only we had built it at that time it would be operating now. It would be up and running. The reason we did not was it was delayed in planning. If I recall rightly, there was an archaeological issue. To be perfectly honest I did not think it was significant. That one issue held it up in planning and in a legal challenge for approximately two or three years. I am going on memory. In that time there was a change of government. The new Government came in and took it out of the four-year plan and it did not proceed. The planning delay killed it. I have direct personal experience. I hate to come back to always answering this question by saying it depends on how long it takes us to get through planning but this is from direct experience of a similar project, which was ready to go and which we would have built for a fraction of what it will cost us in the end but it was delayed in planning and a legal challenge.