Luke Flanagan (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent) | Oireachtas source

When a railroad is built and someone suggests that a service be developed the first thing the people who want rail ask is, when was the last time any of these things made a profit. Apart from tolled roads, when did a road last make a profit? No one ever asks that question.

The road from Castlerea to Galway has never made a profit. It is not possible. On the basis of what many people say about rail, therefore, we should rip up that road and forget about it. We need to adopt a different attitude towards rail and ask about the social dividend and people's ability to get from A to B in an efficient, sustainable way. That does not appear to have been examined, which is taking a blinkered view.

People talk about the infrastructure of our rail network. The greatest pieces of infrastructure are the stations, but all I have seen throughout my lifetime is the architectural rape of these buildings. At the prettiest little stations one could find - they are a tourist attraction - one would get out not knowing what was in the town just to see them, but nobody will get out at these stations to look at PVC windows that have been put in these old buildings. Will people get out at any of the stations that used to have beautiful cast-iron bridges that have now been replaced with brushed aluminium? Are the people who have been running this country that devoid of class that they cannot see beauty when it stares them in the eye?

I see numerous buildings around the country near railway stations that are owned by the State being ripped apart, with ivy growing through the roofs. I saw that happen to two buildings in Castlerea. They solved the problem with one of them by knocking it down and crushing the cut limestone; I do not know where it ended up. That was probably one of the most beautiful buildings in the town. Who makes these silly decisions? We cannot get these buildings back.

When I was mayor of Roscommon we had a celebration at Castlerea train station for the 150th anniversary of rail coming to our area. At the time I was considering what a remarkable change that was for a post-famine town where thousands of people had died in the workhouses. We went from a situation in which the fastest way of getting from A to B was probably on foot or, if one had a few quid, on a horse, to one in which people could travel tens of miles an hour. I thought it interesting that 150 years down the line, if one will pardon the pun, from the establishment of the most modern transport system on the planet at the time, the day we celebrated the 150th anniversary of its arrival in town, we had broadband communication that was a thousand times slower than that in South Korea. At the time I thought we had not progressed very far.

I hope people might learn from the fact that years ago, even though we were not ruling the country ourselves, the people running it seemed to be confident enough to say that we could have the best in the world. My fear about what is happening here is that it will be a way of burying the idea of rail even further below the big priority of road networks and that eventually we will end up with nothing.

Governments attempted to close our railway station in Castlerea in the 1980s and those the entire way down to Westport. They did not succeed. The fear is that in what the Minister is intending to do, rail will be forgotten - the plan does not have any real mention of rail - but whatever happens in the future, I ask that whoever is running the system learn from the fact that what is left will not be replaced if we get rid of it, because we no longer seem to be able to produce phenomenal architecture. We only need to look at Athlone, which had a very pretty station on the Roscommon side. If it was on the Westmeath side that would have been fine also. This is not a "Roscommon is more important than Westmeath" argument. They built what I consider to be an architectural abomination on the Westmeath side. In terms of what they did with the original station, they did not even board up the windows in a pretty way. They put in bare concrete blocks in the windows. They might as well have sprayed graffiti on it as well and said, "We don't care. Who's going to stop us?".

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