They’ll waste billions and cause urban chaos rather than go by bus

THE political joke last week concerned the comparison between Irish and English politics.

In England, David Blunkett neglected adequately to report investments being made by his son and, despite being a close confidante of the prime minister, had to resign. End of political career. In Ireland, Martin Cullen lost nearly €60 million in the e-voting debacle and, despite being given a most lacklustre vote of confidence by his Taoiseach at the time, was handed a budget of €34 billion to play with.

Or was he? The first problem with this so-called Transport 21 initiative is that it is impossible to find any substantiation whatever of its reality. I started by looking at the website of the Department of Transport, which is where you'd expect to find a bit of detail.

No less than four speeches are recorded on the website Taoiseach, Tánaiste, Minister for Finance, and the Minister for Transport himself. There are lovely coloured maps of the road network as it's going to be, the rail network, the joys that await Cork commuters, and so on. There's a downloadable page of statistics, enough to make your head spin: €175 million extra public transport users, 80,000 more bus passengers per day, an Atlantic corridor "connecting the Gateways of Letterkenny, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford," a saving of up to 39 minutes by car from Dublin to Galway, and lots, lots more.

All this detail, all this rhetoric.

The best brains in the country (I hope they all got their degrees from recognised universities) have put the whole thing together. It can't go wrong, and it won't go wrong. And it all adds up to the princely sum of €34.4 billion.

Except how does it? Buckets of projects more or less a project for every back garden and no costings for any of them. We are the poor sods, otherwise known as citizens of Ireland, who will have to pay for all this. Surely we have a right to know how it's costed? You've probably heard already how the Taoiseach and the minister dealt with our right to know, and our need to know, each time they have been questioned about it. Before I go into that, you may not have had brought to your attention what Finance Minister Brian Cowen said about the costings. It was contained in the speech released in his name at the super-duper launch of Transport 21.

Here's what he said: "The investment has been planned on the basis that the economy will grow close to its potential over the medium term and that the successful, prudent management of the public finances will continue to generate the flows of revenue to sustain this and other public investment. I would stress that this is an imperative I know that exhaustive work has been put into the costings by appropriate agencies and I have received assurances from them via the Department of Transport as to their robustness I expect all the agencies to deliver the programme in full, on time and within the budget of €34.4 billion

"There will be intensive system of monitoring put in place and this will be an important factor in ensuring the achievement of value for money. In addition, certain major projects will be brought before Cabinet to get the specific approval of Government before they can proceed to the contract stage "

I don't know about you, but I detect a strong note of caution, even scepticism, in Brian Cowen's speech. Loyal to the last he may be, but you still won't find any of the hype that punctuated the other speeches released on the day. If the estimates go wrong, or the plan becomes suddenly hard to deliver (say on the other side of the general election), Brian has the ground covered.

Not so the Taoiseach and the Transport Minister. It was amazing to hear them both settle on the same line of defence. We won't substantiate the figures, they said, because that would weaken our negotiating position when we go to look for suppliers and partners. If we published the detailed costings, potential suppliers would know what they are.

SO? That's the way everyone else does it. Only the Irish Government puts figures on the back of an envelope and hopes they're an approximation of reality. If you're getting a job done on your house or your car, you get the builder or the garage to give you an estimate first, don't you? That way, you know you can stick them to the estimate, and you have something to take to the bank when you're looking for a loan.

Or maybe you already have some money let's say you have €10,000 to spare and you want to do a job on the house. If that's your limit, you tell the tradesman he can't exceed it. But Martin Cullen thinks it's sensible to tell the world you're going to spend €34 billion, but not to reveal the actual amount until all the bids are in. So when he does put the transport plan out to tender, and the best offers come in at, say, €50 billion, is he going to tell us all that there was a little bit of a problem with his first guess.

What do you think? All of the media over the weekend were cautious. But it was a sort of "we really need this, we have to give it a chance" sort of caution. I understand that only too well. We desperately need significant improvement in public transport provision, both in terms of quantity and quality. But apart from the crazy way the whole thing has been costed, this plan is a nightmare.

Stephen's Green, Grafton Street and College Green in Dublin are going to be unusable for years once this plan gets going. There is no other capital city in the world, in this day and age, that would allow its commercial and tourist heart to be torn apart in the way that this plan proposes.

You can't do what is proposed here without tearing down and rebuilding the heart of the capital city. It's monstrous.

And it's all the more monstrous because we can do it with buses. I know, it sounds simple. But the cities that have massive undergrounds built them in Victorian times or in the aftermath of war. All other modern European cities, and most American cities the size of Dublin, deal with transport by using buses.

I suspect that if you did the sums, you could run a free yes, free shuttle bus service in and around our major cities for a fraction of what we are going to pay out by the time all this is done. But that doesn't sound nearly as sexy as metros meeting Luases and linking up to DARTS. A simple, easy solution wouldn't win an election, would it? Or would it?