Only 1 of 16 MetroLink stations are at Dublin Aiport, so why are its opponents so focused on it?

Comment & Analysis: Michael McDowell and his The Irish Times editors have been around long enough to know that MetroLink as a project is not mainly designed to serve Dublin Airport. It’s planned to be a nearly 19km of high-capacity railway with 16 stations.

Yet, after decades of some form of metro being proposed on the northside, we’re still getting articles based around Dublin Airport being the only place north of the Liffey that needs serving by high capacity, high frequency and reasonably fast rail link.

The headline of his latest article is “Is the Metrolink really the best way to provide a rail link to Dublin Airport?” and the standfirst is “A new strategy review document favours building a surface railway to serve Dublin Airport by linking it to the Dublin suburban network at Clongriffin”.

Headlines can often be attributed to editors or subeditors rather than the writer, but within the article text, McDowell writes: “Intriguingly the new strategy review document now favours building a surface railway to serve Dublin Airport by linking it to the Dublin suburban network at Clongriffin”, but he adds: “But we are told that this investment would merely ‘complement’ the massively expensive Metrolink subway project which the NTA is currently attempting to persuade An Bord Pleanála to authorise.”

But McDowell also posted a link to the article on Twitter without expressing any issue with its editing.

This level of focus on the airport amounts to disinformation.

Misinformation is where people are getting the facts wrong, while disinformation is designed to deliberately mislead people. Both often suck people in by being combined with facts and things that sound plausible. On the point of the airport, I’ll let McDowell and his editors argue over who’s more responsible for it.

The article is also another clear example of McDowell’s unwillingness or inability to do the most basic research before writing an article for a national newspaper.

He wrote: “The strategic rail review plan does not include any radical expansion of the Dublin Luas network, presumably because it is concerned with heavy rail only.”

There’s no reason to presume anything here unless he’s unable to read All-Island Strategic Rail Review, in which case why is he writing an article about it and muddling his different ideas about rail together.

McDowell is known to be a keen legal mind but he uses the phrase “reopening lines abandoned” and then mentions the Waterford-Wexford and the Mullingar-Athlone lines. These lines have not been abandoned and remain fully in the ownership of the State via CIE.

In legal terms, abandoned railways have very clear meanings and a national newspaper calling State-owned property abandoned is reckless, considering that there have been many infringements on some disused lines in the past.

He uses much of his article to outline factual points of the rail review, but the way he does so is a distortion too. Readers might be left with the impression they know what the plan is about but a large part of the review suggests capacity improvements along main lines which serve intercity and other inter-urban routes — including double tracking lines, adding passing loops, and even building standalone tracks to separate inter-urban services from suburban rail.

Some on social media even think McDowell’s many mistakes are intentional — such as saying, “A DART underground interconnector between Heuston and Connolly stations.” Dart Underground was not planned to go to Connolly but to the Docklands.

This is not just a nerdy point; the fact that McDowell keeps getting these points wrong goes to the heart of his lack of understanding of why rail projects are built for capacity reasons along a corridor, not just to serve locations as a tickbox exercise.

A Dart Underground tunnel from Heuston and Connolly or a rail link from Clongriffin to the airport would have serious capacity issues.

“An Irish Rail executive recently informed the Oireachtas Transport Committee that this could be done by Irish Rail in less than five years. The committee was told that such a surface rail link to Dublin Airport would cost less than €1 billion,” McDowell wrote.

The capacity issue on the northern line to allow for the Clongriffin to airport link is noted and solved in the rail review by adding extra tracks between Clongriffin and the city centre. In other words, not under €1 billion in total. And it would be yet another project where the likes of McDowell can complain about the cost of rail while blindly advocating for more motorways without talking about the best use of funding for society widely, including climate change, good planning, etc.

On the lack of Luas he writes: “With new technology (including VLR -very light rail- or trackless tramsets), the Luas network could be expanded to cover most of Dublin’s suburbs rather than the minority of the city now served by the Luas Green and Red lines.”

Very light rail is total nonsense driven to appease people like McDowell who do not want to spend money on public transport, and “trackless tramsets” are buses.

Maybe the most honest part of his article is his listing of road projects and his apparent fear that rail projects will consume the funding which would otherwise go to large-scale road projects. That seems to get to the real issue he and other commenters like him have with rail transport, which is why they have thrown everything they can at delaying or derailing projects.

McDowell writes: “The strategy optimistically envisages switching much of the road freight traffic to trains operating from ports to inland rail freight hubs. Is that practical? Does it make sense to largely abandon road transport if we also plan for cars, vans and trucks powered by electricity, hydrogen and other renewables?”

However, the rail review report states: “This Review has therefore considered how the railway could support a level of rail freight mode comparable to Western European countries — around 10%, which reflects an ambition to use rail freight to decarbonise the island’s transport system.”

How on earth does McDowell come out with phrases like “switching much of the road freight traffic to trains” and “largely abandon road transport” when we’re talking about around 10% of a share of land freight switching to rail?

Readers will have to decide if McDowell is a misinformation mastermind or totally clueless and unable to even skim through a report.

Finishing the article, he then asks: “Who is making these choices? What likelihood is there of implementing this distant vision?” Experts are making the recommendations and, at the end of the day, politicians are making the choices if projects are given the green light once planning is secured.

The likelihood of projects getting to that stage is reduced due to highly misleading attacks on public transport. McDowell, in the article, also lists the funding spent on Dart Underground, which is shelved for the foreseeable future. Metro North, the predecessor to MetroLink, also had huge sunken costs because it did not proceed.

One of the largest risks to large-scale projects is delay — be it sunken costs or inflation. Any time repeated calls for project evaluation based on cost concerns are made, it usually means a higher price tag than if the project had proceeded. The people or politicians who claim to have cost concerns should look for projects to be built faster.

A lot of blame for that kind of waste of funding due to large-scale projects not proceeding in a timely manner is the responsibility of Government Ministers over the years, who have collective Cabinet responsibility. This includes McDowell’s time as Minister. So, McDowell is part of the problem in so many ways.