LUAS project - Taxpayers face rough ride in fiasco

LUAS – lamentable, unbelievable, abysmal and shocking – an apt acronym for Dublin’s shambles of a city rail system. So appalling has the situation become that Transport Minister Seamus Brennan is openly admitting that aspects of the light rail network are a mess and a huge mistake.

If there was a prize for ineptitude Luas would win hands down. As Mr Brennan put it, if they were “starting with a clean sheet of paper and knowing today’s figures they would probably opt for a complete city-wide metro and probably do 100% of it underground”.

So snarled would be the scheme’s potential traffic fallout at the Red Cow Roundabout that the minister is considering putting parts of the railway up on stilts. It could only happen in Ireland.

Serious questions now confront the Government. What was the Cabinet thinking when it gave its collective approval so flippantly to Luas? What advice was former minister Mary O’Rourke given that she gave the green light so easily to a venture which her successor is now calling a mess?

Even before a track was laid, the taxpayer was being taken for a ride. As we now know, cost estimates for the project were so outlandish they were a multiple of what a similar operation cost in Spain.

To say the Government took its eye off the ball is an understatement. And yet, up to now, the Coalition has defended this debacle at every twist of the rocky Luas journey.

To be fair to Mr Brennan, he has inherited a mess. To his credit, even though he was a player in the administration that gave it the nod, he at least had the courage to put his head above the parapet and acknowledge the full extent of the bungling.

As hard-pressed taxpayers don the hairshirt to pay for the Coalition’s profligacy, and Dublin is beset by trench warfare, it is a poor consolation to learn that in the future Luas can be upgraded to a metro including underground sections.

It is also difficult to square the minister’s damning admission with the Railway Procurement Agency’s promise it will be finished within budget and on time. What faith can be placed in official estimates when the whopping original cost was slashed from €2.2 billion to €1.5bn overnight.

This followed a revelation that Madrid got its system up and running for a third of the Dublin estimate resulting from increased costs caused by over-staffing and time-wasting.

The writing was on the wall when Fianna Fáil’s Eoin Ryan, chairman of the Oireachtas Transport Committee, broke ranks and described the Luas as “headed for a fiasco”.

As the ill-fated project became the topic of bizarre rumours, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern had to deny reports that the two Luas lines under construction were not compatible with one another. In a mystery train announcement, Mr Ahern assured jaundiced Dubliners that the carriages on each line were interchangeable with those on the other line.

It would be laughable if the situation were not so serious. Factual accounts of spiralling costs and farcical planning decisions continue to perplex a bemused public.

The Coalition’s credibility and that of the agency responsible for the project are at stake. Unless it starts on time and within budget, the Luas will give beleaguered taxpayers a nightmare train ride.