Metro Costs

It’s an indication of the politics of the day that the opposition are trying to get legs on costs. Press releases follow front-page splashes, calls for Cullen to come clean on costs. “He is a crap manager, make it stick” comes the instructions from the press room in the bowels of opposition HQ. We know this, and he genuinely can’t be trusted with public finances. It’s an easy hit but it’s the wrong hit.

Cullen and this government have been shocking when it comes to transport. They have been in power for ten years. Traffic in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick, not to mention the exploding towns around the country, is making life hellish for commuters, and Dublin has bus-lanes with no buses.

They haven’t just dallied on how to provide buses the issue was parked, leaving Dublin Bus requests on hold while the debate between public or private provision—a necessary one—was kept under wraps. They ignored pleas for a western corridor for years, until it suddenly becomes vital for the West. Was it not vital for the West when the boom was getting going?

Then we have the M50, tolled roads and a failure to capitalise on huge growth in the use of trains and the port tunnel. The first actions of the initial minster was to scrap a metro plan with the wrong parties credentials on it in favour of a Luas which went unconnected.

When transport decisions are taken, they are taken in a vacuum, with no coherent strategy seeming to exist between port tunnels, tolling, M50 traffic, motorway use, etc. They are once-off projects not designed to deal with what is a systemic problem in mobility in this country.

Don’t bother giving legs to a lack of coherent strategy, stemming from lack of interest and lack of agreement by the two coalition parties (incidentally the same accusation levelled at FG/Lab), go instead for a short term blip on the radar. Cullen already has his reputation.

They aren’t wrong to point out that this man is the leaky sieve to our public finances, yet they are quite wrong to solely focus on this and not place in proper context the lack of leadership on any side of the government over transport.