Road and rail works must be speeded up, says Tánaiste

NEW ways must be found of removing delays and speeding up badly-needed infrastructural projects, such as major road and rail works, Tánaiste and Enterprise Minister Mary Harney urged yesterday.

She also called for more flexibility from the EU to allow the Government borrow for capital works that would help underpin future economic growth and would be provided for in Critical Infrastructure Bills.

Ms Harney conceded that the €6 billion roads’ development programme under the National Development Plan to 2006 would prove an “awful lot less” than was originally planned.

“We’re a very small country and it shouldn’t take five, six or seven hours to get from Dublin to parts of the West, or South-East”, she said in a keynote address to the Beverage Council of Ireland (BCI) conference, in Hotel Europe, Killarney.

“I’ve been on visits to the US with the IDA and we might have to travel one- and-a-half, or two hours outside a city. But, we can get there pretty quickly because the roads are so good.

“In Ireland, it takes forever to get somewhere. They used to say Navan was only an hour from Dublin.

“Now, it takes two hours, even though neither Navan, nor Dublin, have moved,” she continued.

She said that, at present, we did not have the capacity to borrow the money we needed. But, it wasn’t all about money, It was also about value for money.

Referring to the high-cost Luas project, which would be at least €20 million over budget, Ms Harney said a railway stretching over 2,000 miles in Australia was built for the same price as the 23km Luas, which she described as a “dreadful indictment of our process”. She also said the idea of running the Luas into the Red Cow roundabout, one of the busiest road junctions in the country, was incredible.

Also at the conference, IBEC’s director of economic affairs Brian Geoghegan said the Celtic Tiger may have slowed to walking pace and we had lost competitiveness because of rising costs compared to our trading partners.

But, he pointed out, there were still things going right for us, amid signs of a modest recovery. Mr Geoghegan warned the Government against introducing any measures in the forthcoming Budget that would contribute to inflation, especially through tax increases.

He also said he would be in favour of borrowing for capital projects that would be of long-term economic benefit, including main roads, water and power supplies and broadband facilities.