2. Progress on Prior Strategy
Political decision-making
The Strategy fails to acknowledge the extensive postponements, cancellations and delays that have characterised the provision of long planned rail (DART, Luas) within the Greater Dublin Area. To take a relatively small example: the Strategy announces that Metrolink will go to planning in 2022, but this is already a postponement of dates announced earlier. To take the most extreme case: a Railway Order for the Interconnector (DART Undergroud) was approved in 2011, at the time Iarnród Éireann claimed that if construction started in 2012, the project would be completed by 2018. Although accelerating climate change and continued unsustainable housing make the need for public transport more urgent than ever, the Strategy makes no attempt to document how these delays have exacerbated car dependency within the GDA. The Strategy ignores that such delays mean that Dublin will have to make even greater investments in even shorter periods of time if emissions targets are to be met. Finally the Strategy makes no comment on the continued ad hoc nature of Dublin transport projects. Because there has been no overall programme there has been little build-up of expertise, competence and institutional memory in either the construction firms or the state organisations commissioning the projects. Astonishingly, when construction of the last Luas links in Dublin ended there was no shovel-ready project ready to begin! Ultimately all of this is the result of the lack of any serious political commitment to Dublin transport by successive governments. Unless these failures are openly acknowledged we are doomed to repeat them.