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

There has been 30 years of work on this issue so it was not just by press release that they were trying to make the case. The fundamental case is that the plan can and should change, and it already has changed. It included in its original form a DART interconnector which has since been removed by the Government as an aspiration or put off into never-never land. As a result, the MetroLink plan has been moved to the city and, as a consequence, now threatens the Markievicz pool. That plan is constantly changing and it has to change further to get it right.

The key failing, and it is only in the detail that we discover this, is that going back and turning the green line into a metro line is a flawed engineering approach. It is flawed because it has to be shut for a year or a year and a half, flawed because all the great aspects of pedestrian accessibility are being taken away and flawed because it is missing the opportunity to branch elsewhere. The key concept is that we do not just connect MetroLink into the green line, but we keep the tunnel running. Once there is a tunnelling machine in the ground, I am told by the engineers I trust that it is much lower-cost to keep the tunnel running, so we should use that opportunity to keep it running to the south west. As an alternative, we could keep it running to the south east to UCD and Sandyford, or, as Councillor Duffy suggested, have a southside loop. This is what Copenhagen has done in the same time we have been talking; it has built two metro lines while we have been thinking about it and saying we are going to do it. Copenhagen is now building just such an orbital loop and I see no reason we should not do that for south Dublin.

We asked the NTA what our climate emissions will be from transport in Dublin, given all the other planned projects, and its answer was that there would be increase of 30%. I said to Mr. Cregan at the BusConnects meeting on Monday that this metro alternative should be done. He agreed it was the right project but he said he could not do it because he does not have political clearance for it, effectively. He would love to do it but he needs political support to make it happen, which is why the Minister and his Cabinet colleagues are critical. This is a political decision. Will the Minister think big about public transport in south Dublin or is he going to stick to the existing plan?

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