The company that built the Moscow metro , Mos-Metrostroy, has expressed an interest in constructing Dublin's proposed metro system.
The director-general of the company, Mr Gennady Shtern, told The Irish Times in Moscow his company would like to discuss the matter with "Irish experts on metro construction".
He expressed surprise, however, at the Irish estimate of 15 years for the completion of the project.
On average the construction of a metro tunnel of 14 km would take five to six years, he said, with overground sections being completed much sooner.
"A great deal is determined by the geology of the site and the type of tunnelling equipment used, but 15 years seems a very long time," he said.
In Dublin, the project director of the light rail scheme, Mr Donal Mangan, welcomed the interest shown by the Russian company and said he did not disagree with construction times of five to six years which were in line with estimates he had received.
Mr Mangan said the 15 years quoted for completion of the project would incorporate the full network. When the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, gave that figure she was assuming that construction of the different parts of the network would not all be happening at once.
Apart from the time for construction, other elements had to be considered including public consultation, and the legal and planning process. The legal process alone, which would include a public inquiry, would take at least a year. After that, it would take a couple of years to draw up detailed plans and consult people who would be affected by the project.
He pointed out that the full network - most of which would not be underground - would incorporate three or four lines.
Mr Mangan said a Japanese company and other firms had also been making inquiries about the Dublin project. The Government had asked project managers to be ready to advertise within a year, he added.
In Moscow, Mr Shtern said talks on Russian involvement in the proposed Dublin system would need to take place at governmental level on both sides.
Mos-Metrostroy is a subsidiary company of the Moscow city government which was in a joint venture with Aer Rianta on a major shopping centre in downtown Moscow. The city government's head, Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, has visited Dublin and hosted a meeting with the Taoiseach during Mr Ahern's visit to Moscow last year.
The Moscow Metro is regarded as one of the more efficient and certainly the most architecturally impressive and varied in the world. Stations on lines built in the Stalinist era are almost baroque in character with crystal chandeliers and marble columns.
Two stations, Mayakovskaya, which features stainless-steel arches, and Kropotkinskaya with the clean lines of a Greek temple, have won international architectural prizes. The Mayakovskaya station, for example, was the venue for Politburo meetings under Stalin during the German bombing of the city.
Figures for March of last year showed that Moscow's metro carried an average of 13.5 million passengers daily over a network of 11 lines and more than 250 km of tunnels. At peak hours there is a train roughly every 40 seconds and passengers rarely have to wait for more than four minutes for a train at off-peak times.
The metro system opens at 5.30 a.m. each day, and last trains run at 1 a.m. The metro is run as a public service rather than a profit-making company. A 10-journey ticket covering the entire system costs just £1.
Expansions of the system are in constant progress. In 1996, despite severe economic difficulties in Russia, Mos-Metrostroy completed the new 16-km Lyublino line. The company has experience outside Russia having built the Prague metro and completed tunnelling projects in Israel.
Metro construction in Russia has also overcome some extremely difficult engineering problems. The city of St Petersburg, which is built on a swamp close to the broad Neva river, has a metro system almost as comprehensive as Moscow's.
While the Dublin plan would appear to rule out construction on Moscow's grandiose scale it could be of similar proportions to the metros in smaller Russian and former Soviet cities.