Chairwoman leaves Dublin transport role

Minister for Transport Martin Cullen is seeking a new transport expert to chair the interim Dublin Transport Authority after the Trinity College academic Prof Margaret O'Mahony withdrew her name yesterday.

Prof O'Mahony, who also chaired a project team set up to decide how the proposed new transport authority should operate, said she had accepted a chair of civil engineering in Trinity College.

She said that although a number of recommendations contained in the report of the project team had been rejected by the Government, she had not known of this until the report's launch yesterday. It had not been the cause of her decision to withdraw her name as chairwoman-designate of the authority.

Prof O'Mahony and her other project team members - assistant secretaries general at the Department of Transport John Lumsden and Pat Mangan, and Mr Cullen's special adviser Colin Hunt, submitted their report on the proposed authority to the Minister last March.

Among its recommendations on land use and planning was that local authorities in the greater Dublin area - Dublin City, Fingal, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, South Dublin, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow - should have their development plans subject to approval by the Dublin Transport Authority.

However, Mr Cullen said yesterday that this was rejected by the Government as it interfered "with the democratic principle" that local authorities had the right to draw up their own development plans.

Instead the Government decided that it would require all planning authorities to have regard to the Dublin Transport Authority strategy. It will be encouraged to make submissions to the drafting of development plans and this process is to be supervised by Minister for the Environment Dick Roche.

Asked what other recommendations she would like included, Prof O'Mahony said she wanted a greater urgency with the roll-out of bus priority lanes, real-time information at bus stops and greater responsiveness to incidents from traffic-control centres.

Following the publication of the project team report, Mr Cullen said he was still seeking views from interested parties on the views contained in the report and he said he would finalise his views and publish a Bill before Christmas.

He also proposes to appoint an interim authority which would become the statutory authority.

Referring to the withdrawal of Prof O'Mahony, Mr Cullen said he had become increasingly convinced that the authority required a chair who could devote virtually all of his or her time to the establishment of the authority.

Having discussed this with Prof O'Mahony, she had indicated that her work at Trinity would preclude her from taking up the post full time.

The withdrawal further complicates issues surrounding the authority for Mr Cullen.

Fine Gael's spokeswoman on transport Olivia Mitchell said it left him with no interim chair, no board and as yet no Bill to establish the authority. Ms Mitchell also pointed to the absence of any moves in yesterday's report to liberalise the bus market in Dublin.

"It shows policy is being made up as he goes along," she said.

MAIN RECOMMENDATIONS

• The geographical remit of the organisation should be the seven local authorities in the Greater Dublin Region - the four Dublin authorities with Meath, Kildare and Wicklow. However, the team also recommended that the authority should also consider longer commuting patterns from outside that area.

• That the authority have overall responsibility for surface transport in the Greater Dublin area.

• That the authority have responsibility for strategic transport planning; procurement of public transport infrastructure and services; regulation of fares; delivery of an integrated public transport system; traffic management; demand management and data collection and research.