A claimed cost estimate of €23.39 billion for Dublin’s planned MetroLink is not part of the normal price estimate range. It is seen as 95% unlikely and seen as a “worst-case scenario”, but media coverage has been criticised for making people think otherwise.
MetroLink is a planned automated railway between Dublin City Centre and Swords, serving areas such as Ballymun, Glasnevin, Phibsborough, the Mater Hospital, O’Connell Street, Tara Street, St Stephen’s Green, and Charlemont.
The project is being planned by Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) and the National Transport Authority and is currently awaiting a railway order, a type of planning permission.
Cllr Feljin Jose (Green Party), who is a councillor for Cabra-Glasnevin and a former chair of the Dublin Commuters, a campaign group which advocates for sustainable transport, said: “So, why has the cost of MetroLink gone up to €23 billion? It hasn’t. With inflation, they said it’s going to cost €7.1 billion and €12.5 billion with a mid-figure of €9.5 billion.”
“The €23 billion figure is also in here, it is a worst-case scenario. To quote the report, it is accounting for ‘unknown, unknown risks’, that is, if everything goes so high that bread costs you €10, in that case, MetroLink is going to cost €23 billion — that’s not a prediction, that’s not a cost estimate, that’s not a forecast, it’s a worst case scenario,” he said.
Cllr Jose said: “Yet in the last week, I’ve seen several media outlets quote the €23 billion figure, and I’ve seen very little criticism from elected representatives from areas which MetroLink is going to drastically improve.”
He added: “So, will it get cheaper if we wait? No. The original figure in 2018 was €3 billion, the longer we wait, the more it’s going to cost. What we need to do is get on with it and build MetroLink as soon as possible.”
An Irish Times article outlined that “The briefing states that the ‘P95 costs’ of the completed project should be €23.39 billion, less VAT. P95 means a 95 per cent certainty that the project will be completed on or under that budget.”
But the newspaper only listed that information in the 4th paragraph under the headline “Cost of long-delayed Metrolink project could rise to more than €23bn, Minister told”.
The Irish Times news article was derived from the Incoming Ministerial Brief for the new Minister for Transport, Darragh O’Brien.
The Irish Times outlined in its 2nd paragraph that “The mooted cost is almost twice the highest previous estimate for the project, which was put at between €7.16 billion and €12.25 billion in 2021.”
However, the briefing paper included the same cost range with the €23 billion figure mentioned as the P95 cost. The briefing said: “The Preliminary Business Case provided a range of potential costs from €7.16bn to €12.25bn in 2021 prices, all excluding VAT, with the report of DPENDR [Department of Public Expenditure and Reform]’s Major Projects Advisory Group noting potential upper-range ‘P95’ costs of €23.39bn, also excluding VAT.”
The briefing report said: “A definitive total scheme budget and target cost proposal will only be known after procurement and will be brought to Government for consideration at Approval Gate 3 of the Infrastructure Guidelines.”
The article in The Irish Times also led to secondary coverage in other media outlets, which were even less clear about the low likelihood of the project costing €23.39 billion. The figure, for example, was repeated at the start of shows on Newstalk and RTE Radio One.
Brian Caulfield, a professor in transportation at TCD, told Radio One’s Drivetime programme that all of the cost-benefit analyses for the project have always been positive. He also highlighted that it was the “worst-case scenario” and not in the normal price range.
Asked by a Drivetime presenter about how the project might compare to the Children’s Hospital, which has been beset with cost overruns, Caulfield said: “If you look at what we have done on Metro, we have had it reviewed by international experts, we have had it reviewed by the European Commission, they have an agency called Jaspers, they have said it is value for money… I’m not sure all of this happened on the Children’s Hospital, and the review by PWC did say that the costs of the Children’s Hospital were very much so underestimated.”
He added: “The other thing is that we build transport projects in this country. We don’t build them frequently enough, but we do build them, and TII has been successful in building projects on time and under budget, while the Children’s Hospital was very much so a one-off piece of infrastructure which has been built and not something we have a huge amount of experience with.”
Cllr Jose also questioned why so few politicians have come to defend the project after the spate of coverage.
IrishCycle.com could only find one other politician who has spoken out since the article — Cllr Luke Corkery, a Fine Gael councillor for Swords, who criticised Senator Michael McDowell’s Irish Times latest article on MetroLink, which followed the news article in the same newspaper.
Cllr Corkery wrote: “I note with concern yet another opinion piece by Michael McDowell suggesting that MetroLink be scrapped. Yet again, I find myself asking why he continues to trivialise a project that – while far too long awaited – will be a critical piece of infrastructure not just for the airport, but for every community it will serve in North Dublin. “
“It is no secret that Ireland’s arcane planning system has left gaping holes in our country’s transport infrastructure. Nowhere is that more evident than on Dublin’s northside. The people I represent in Swords, and so many others, are paying the price. But, speaking as one of those people, I can testify that the solution is not to “shout stop”, to coin a phrase. The solution is to crack on. Why? Because every day without MetroLink is another day of congested roads, jam-packed buses, and frustrated commuters,” he said.
He added: “It is amusing, however, that such an advocate for the Luas [McDowell in his article] told Dail Eireann in 1996 that said Luas was an “expensive toy train set that will damage the city rather than improve it”. Let’s be very clear: there is no alternative to MetroLink.”
MetroLink is planned as a partly underground and fully segregated automated railway that will link with Luas lines and the current and planned Dart line at a number of locations, connecting Dublin’s local rail network as it never has been before, as well as linking to key bus and coach hubs at O’Connell Street and Dublin Airport.
ALSO READ: McDowell’s views on MetroLink is populist brain rot dressed up as intellectual thinking
So…. In 2018 the everything going absolutely to plan with no problems at all estimated cost was €3 billion.
In 2021 that nothing going wrong whatsoever cost had gone up by about 140% to over €7 billion.
We’re in 2025 now. As someone who has done house renovations at different stages over those years until my cash supply kept running out, and I still have much more to do, I’m painfully aware that building costs have gone up again substantially since 2021 and it’s going to be more years before an actual excavator or borer will be in the ground.
Let’s just call the most realistic cost by say 2028 will be plus €10 billion?
I’m being fatalistically serious.
The best time to build this wonderful piece of national infrastructure was when Bertie was booming and getting boomier.
There were Spanish and Chinese highly experienced contractors dying to get the contract for a fraction of €3 billion and we foolishly balked at these bargain prices.
It should be built and it needs to be built.
But I would also lay a veterinary bovine castrater on the table beside the document signed by whatsoever minister of the moment and the leading officials who would have drafted the contract with a promise that if it goes one cent over €10 billion, they’re going to feel the squeeze.
Perhaps not with an actual burdizzo, but certainly there has to be consequences for incompetence and mismanagement of vast amounts of public money.
We have been spending cash like drunken sailors for the last few years. With plenty of pimps willing to take it from us. With Trump for the next 4 years at least, we could shortly be facing budget deficits instead of surplus’s.
The future isn’t certain but it’s time to start watching the small details for everything when we’re used to casually talking in billions.
And throwing those who are supposed to be competent in managing the publics money to the wolves for failure.
The ever escalating cost of the Metro – before anything is even started – just shows how vainglorious an idea it was from the start.
If the powers that be had just kept building a LUAS north from O’CS, the new LUAS would be most of the way to the airport by now and at a fraction of the current cost of the Metro, never mind its projected final figure.
(And to set the latter comment in context, the amount spent on the Metro so far, before it’s gone a millimetre of the distance to the airport already exceeds the cost of completing the two LUAS lines when they were initially built).
Hi Paul, Luas Red Line — 21km and 25 million passenger trips annually (2023)
MetroLink — 18km and 53 million passenger trips annually.
MetroLink will hava a peak carrying capacity of 20k passengers in each direction, far beyond what a tram line can handle.
The extra costs for the planning of a metro related to the political decisions to delay and totally rework the project but there’s no estimates which would put the planning costs above the delivery of a Luas line of the same length.
The original Luas cost over €700m (which is more than any estimate of planning costs for Metro North and MetroLink combined) but it would cost much more today.
I cringing that a TCD rep says that a P95 estimate is not in the “normal” range, it’s 1.96 std deviation above the mean (which has quite a realistic chance of occurring within a normal distribution).
They should know better, and not be casually throwing around “normal”, especially when in relation to statistics.
it sounds to me that folks are trying to confirm/reject the upper bound 23B costing by looking at the various quotations given (which is flawed mathematics). We’re all well aware of the children’s hospital!
As a taxpayer I’d like to see contingencies put in place to ensure reckless overspending does not occur. I don’t want to hear massaged ipse Dixit reassurance
The “not in the normal price range” part was my paraphrasing and not a direct quote, but, on careful reflection, it is something that I would stand by. The P95 estimate is the “worst-case scenario” and would likely only to be hit if a very high contract price was greenlit (unlikely) and a poor contract also used (unlikely unless nothing has been learnt from recent massive overspends etc).
Cllr Jame Humphreys (Labour) had a letter in the Irish Times on this subject on March 13th, the day before Luke’s letter. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2025/03/13/letters-to-the-editor-thursday-march-13th-a-metro-for-dublin-prison-overcrowding-aviva-blues/