The £114 million EU funding now likely to be lost to Luas will be available to other Irish projects, a spokeswoman for the EU Commission said yesterday, writes Patrick Smyth, from Brussels.
No decision has yet been made about the fate of the Luas money, however, she said, and the Commissioner for Regional Affairs, Ms Monika Wulf-Mathies, would study the proposals when they were received.
The Commissioner anticipates a decision on the funding at the June meeting of the committee responsible for monitoring the Irish Structural Funds programme. At that stage, the spokeswoman said, if it was felt that Luas had run out of time on the current budget, time constraints also meant other detailed projects would need to be on the table at the meeting. That should not pose a problem, she said, as there were "plenty of other good projects around".
She refused to speculate about whether Luas would attract funding in the post-2000 budget.