Council chairman offers to mediate in DART dispute

The chairman of Wicklow County Council, Mr George Jones, has offered to mediate between the DART drivers' unions and Irish Rail in a move which he hopes will allow testing of the newly-electrified line between Bray and Greystones.

Mr Jones says he is not asking the drivers to concede any ground by allowing the line to open in advance of the resolution of their dispute. He made his offer after it emerged that the DART service to Greystones might not be operational until next spring.

The electrification of the Greystones line was first announced by the then minister for transport, Mr Michael Lowry, during the 1996 Wicklow by-election campaign.

However, a series of setbacks occurred, with delays in the arrival of DART carriages from Spain, where they are built, and corrosion of cable-holders in the tunnels along the five-mile route. A new start-up date of March 1999 was amended to a partial start-up this summer.

That date changed to September before Irish Rail announced that it was suspended pending the resolution of the drivers' dispute. The drivers are seeking a once-off payment of £8,000. The Labour Court has recommended this payment, but the drivers have indicated that they want it tax-free.

Six overhead line engineers also served a claim for £20,000 each to service the extended network, but later indicated that they would settle for whatever the DART drivers accepted.

However, a separate dispute between three drivers' unions has been referred to the High Court. This may be heard by Christmas at best, informed sources indicated yesterday. There would then be a driver-training period of 16 weeks and a line-testing period of four weeks.

This means that the earliest start-up date is likely to be 16 weeks at least after Christmas.

Now, however, Mr Jones has appealed to the unions and Irish Rail management to consider him as a mediator, "to allow the line testing to get under way so that when this dispute is eventually settled . . . we will not then have to wait the additional four to six weeks to allow line-testing."