Dublin needs far more than a metro to function properly as metro from Dublin Airport to Ranelagh to be delayed
GRAND plans always end up on the scrap heap in Ireland. Where there’s a will there’s never a way.
Last Sunday, the Mail reported that the construction of the much-needed Metro from Dublin airport to Ranelagh on the south side of the city will be delayed by up to seven years.
Code for… ‘it will never happen’.
Instead of beginning construction next year, as long planned, the thing is going to be long-fingered yet again and rather than open in 2027, it will not begin operations now until 2034 (if you were to say 2134 it’d be nearer the mark). So much for the Greens in government, eh?
I have my sources in the public transport game - and none of them were able to pour any cold water on the news of another infuriating delay.
In fairness to those who administer and run our public transport services, their hands are well and truly tied.
They are in a strait jacket put on them by a political class that rules with the blindfold on and prefers to wade in mediocrity rather than make enlightened decisions that would transform the lives of the ordinary folk they claim to represent.
Short-sightedness is the chief ingredient in the cocktail that politicians in Leinster House consume.
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What else can one expect from functionaries? Where are the engineers, the architects, the artists, the philosophers and historians among them? Where are the men and women with guts and vision? If they exist they must have donned an invisibility cloak.
And they wonder why fewer and fewer people bother to vote. What’s the point when all their election promises invariably turn to dust? All of them without the wit to understand what’s needed to transform Dublin into a truly global capital city.
If they had the necessary ingredients to govern effectively, the Metro would have been built a long time ago.
It was Fianna Fail, remember, that pulled up all the tram tracks in the 1950s to make way for the car. The greatest act of state vandalism ever committed in modern Irish history.
It took them another 50 years to begin to right that wrong - and when they eventually did build the Luas, they constructed two separate lines that DIDN’T interconnect. Geniuses in charge.
Well, the ditherers in suits have won the day again and the Metro can has been kicked down the dirt road of oblivion.
Dublin, of course, needs far more than a Metro to function properly. It’s but one crucial element in a public transport network that has been redesigned on many, many occasions for the future needs of the more than two million citizens.
None of those iterations has ever been implemented, and the blame for that lies squarely with our political elite.
The plans are all there, waiting for the non-existent nod and the writing of a cheque. They are, have been and will be forever, just pipe dreams.
Take the ambitious proposal to extend the Dart to Drogheda, Maynooth and Celbridge — three new lines that would revolutionise the way people move around.
Despite millions being poured into their design and the fact Irish Rail has put them out for public consultation, they too are being shelved in some dusty ante chamber in Leinster House and labelled: Forgotten.
Then there’s the Bus Connects project - the most important redesign of services in more than 100 years.
It too is plagued by politicking and petty squabbles more suited to Russian gangsters in a cheap bar swilling vodka than the corridors of power.
Vested interests and empty minds mean Bus Connects is also at the end of the long finger.
Instead of rolling out the new network overnight, the thing is being implemented bit by arduous bit over the course of three long years.
They rolled out the first spine, the H, serving Howth, Sutton, Raheny and Donnycarney in June.
It has meant better, more frequent services, despite what the naysayers, and most of them are damned politicians, would have you believe.
The second spine, the C, serving Lucan, Celbridge and Maynooth will, hopefully, begin operations in a few weeks. It will utterly transform the way 200,000 commuters travel every day.
The absolute travesty is that the remainder of the network won’t happen for years, if at all. The long-suffering commuters of Dublin will have to endure their daily misery for a long while yet.
Bus Connects should be up and running in its entirety NOW. But our politicians hadn’t the desire, or the wherewithal to ensure that happened. For that they should hang their heads in shame.
Now more than ever, Dublin needs a world class public transport network. The city is choking and unfit for purpose.
I’ll make this bleak prediction now, one that is as sure-fire as the favourite in a one-horse race: I’ll be long dead before the Metro or Dart Plus or a fully-functioning Bus Connects ever happen.
If they come to fruition and I’m still alive, I’ll run naked from the airport to Stephen’s Green and back, in me Jeyes fluid, dangly bits on glorious display.
But I’ll never be in the nip on the streets because these projects are dead.
Ireland, the graveyard of grand plans.
LOWEST OF LOW OUTSIDE LEO'S PAD
IT’S beneath any right thinking person to acknowledge in any way the knuckle draggers who gathered outside Leo Varadkar’s home last weekend to abuse him.
But such was the disgust I felt to the pit of my stomach at their unconscionable actions that I must lower myself to their level — down where the slugs slither — to hit back at their vile views of the world.
Their associates, those who think Covid-19 vaccines are a form of Government control, have been abusing me for the last two weeks after I dared call out their anti-vaccine conspiracies in a previous column.
Truth is not a word in their lexicon. Their emails to me were laughable attempts at English.
To say they were illiterate would do a disservice to the illiterate.
You’d understand Mandarin better.
But back to the abusers of Leo. The protest was filmed by a particularly inarticulate yob who revelled in using the Tanaiste’s sexuality as a term of abuse.
Lower than a snake’s belly in Death Valley.
Gardai eventually arr- ived and moved them on.
Hate crime legislation is crawling through the Dail. If it had been enacted all of those present at Leo’s house would have been arrested. And rightly so.
'CHANGE OF THE BUREAU' NEEDED
THE bones of a French man and woman are steeped in bureaucracy.
Napoleon and his code for how every aspect of life should be lived is in their very DNA.
That’s why they all write the exact same way — from an early age they are taught to mimic letters and numbers in tightly squared boxes.
What was a marvellous way to mould the perfect citizen of the republic is now wildly out of touch with modern France’s needs. They’ve become a stiff, inflexible lot.
Which helps to explain why the Aussies dumped them at the last minute in negotiations on a multi-billion euro submarine deal and went with America instead.
Macron was left spitting feathers. But rather than blaming Australia or America, he should look closer to home to see where fault lies.
Not with him, but with the French system, one that is intensely bureaucratic, where nothing ever really changes or gets done.
Macron was meant to be the man to reform France. Try as he might, he’s constantly hit a brick wall from those who cling to la vie à la française — the 35-hour week, the two-hour lunch, the pension at 60, the job for life.
In cursing the Aussies and Yanks, he’d do well to remember that the burea- ucrat is always outsmarted by the streetwise.
MUSICAL TASTES IN LOW PLACES
HELL for all eternity is preferable to spending five nights — or even just one — in the presence of Garth Brooks.
Dante’s gate to Hell is inscribed: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. They should affix it to the entrance to Croke Park in time for Mr Brooks’ arrival.
As musical styles go, Country & Western is at the bottom of the barrel alongside musicals and anything produced by an accordion.
Music should grab hold of your soul and bring you to places you’ve never been. It should never be dipped in saccharine, the false sugar.
The mine of truth is well and truly unexplored by the purveyors of Southern melancholy. But what do I know?
Up to 300,000 people will pay €100 a head, or whatever a ticket will cost, to see Brooks warble about Friends In Low Places and how Papa Loved Mama.
Off with them, I say. They’ve been suckered hook, line dance and sinker.
HOMEWORK WAS NOT DONE ON C-19
THE American NPHET, the CDC, this week reported: “To date, most studies of SARS-CoV2 transmission have found that children and adults have a similar risk of transmitting Covid to others.”
Which flies in the face of the advice NPHET and the Government are giving about transmissibility in schools.
Despite the growing evidence to the contrary, they insist schools are still safe environments.
Currently, infection rates in primary schools are DOUBLE what they are in the community, and this week, in their infinite wisdom, the Government, through the Minister for Education Norma Foley, decided pupils who are asymptomatic are no longer requited to quarantine if they are a close contact. Bonkers.
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Asymptomatic transmission is the main driver of Covid-19 infection, so allowing kids who are close contacts to continue to go to school will inevitably lead to more infections.
Logic dictates.
SEPARATED AT BIRTH
I’M not a golfer. I’ve played a full size course once.
The green keeper at Lucan Golf Club has been after me since.
I think I played a 72 par course in 190 shots. Pure brutal I am.
Golf lessons did me no good either. I paid for ten.
Might as well have given the money to a blind man. He’d have hit more balls.
Anyhow, the Ryder Cup starts today and I’ll certainly watch it.
It can be a gripping competition. Shane Lowry is making his debut. He does remind me of Grizzly Adams.