An Irishman's Diary

Alice grew up in Boyle, Co Roscommon and went to boarding school in Bray, Co Wicklow, a little more than 50 years ago.

Picture the journey through Carrick-on-Shannon, Dromod, Jamestown, Newtown Forbes and about a dozen more small villages, in addition to the bigger towns of Longford, Mullingar and the capital city itself. How long did it take her?

"About the same as today," she says. "Three hours or so on the train".

Half a century of straightening and widening roads, building bypasses and motorways as well as developing ever faster cars is suddenly put into perspective.

Remember where the "good road" out of Dublin suddenly expired at a roundabout near Leixlip and the bottlenecks began? We spent much of the past 20 years inching the motorway network torturously outwards from Dublin and from the regional cities. In the past five we have built up the roads programme to a frenetic pace. And still the Sligo train chugs out of Boyle and into Dublin in about three hours. (I know, it was an appalling service in the recent past, but that just emphasised the scanty investment in rail transport.)

Alice now lives near Kells, Co Meath, a town through which the Dublin to Oldcastle railway line used to run. I started going to Kells from north Wicklow in the late 1980s, a journey of about one-and-a-half hours. Now, with dual-carriageway from Wicklow via the M50 and through to the Blanchardstown bypass, the journey from north Wicklow to Kells takes at least two hours. And that depends on Dunshaughlin not being choked with traffic. How long would the 28 mile journey from Navan to Dublin take in a train? Alice doesn't know or can't remember how long it took before the line closed. But she does add that the journey along the Harcourt Line from Dublin to Bray took about a half-an-hour. Faster than Luas.

No doubt there was a plethora of economists advising the late Todd Andrews when he hacked back the rail network. But axing the Harcourt Line at the end of 1958, on the cusp of the economic "rising tide"?

Economists, those practitioners of the "dismal science", now insist that it would have been impossible to forecast the recent economic boom, particularly in relation to the M50 traffic projections. The Taoiseach made a virtue out of this inability accurately to forecast traffic numbers when he heaped praise on National Toll Roads for taking a financial risk in building the West Link bridge, so low was the anticipated level of traffic just over a decade ago.

The reopening of the cross-border Ballymore-

Ballyconnell Canal was also opposed by prominent economists. It cost about €40 million and now pours about €10 million a year into the economy of local towns and villages. Economists reporting on a strategic rail review found little rail development to recommend beyond a small suburban section on the Midleton line in Cork. One very prominent economist saw the development of roads in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, while railways were based on a profit and loss account. Another, equally prominent, has consistently argued against the development of Luas and still does, even though the system may break even on its operating costs by 2006.

This is not to set the motorways against the railways in terms of funding. We need motorways for balanced regional development and we are starting from a long way back in that respect. But railways have another role, one in which motorways should not be involved: commuter traffic. Should we not invest in the Navan railway line just to safeguard the State's investment of €500 million in the adjacent M3? Should we not invest €1.3 billion in Irish Rail's plan for an interconnector in Dublin city? This latter plan would allow the railways to carry more people on the Kildare route than the Red Cow roundabout handles, more people on the Maynooth Line than the M50/N4 junction handles. After all we have committed about €16 billion to inter-urban roads. In the past five years Irish Rail got just over €1 billion to mend its 1,000 miles of track and buy new trains. In contrast, even the 23-odd kilometres of Luas cost €0.75 billion.

Now a new "10 years and beyond" transport plan is about to be unveiled by Minister for Transport Martin Cullen. It is delayed because the economists in the Department of Finance are running a "slide rule" over it. One major monetary item is likely to be a new motorway around Dublin. We know this because the Taoiseach wondered idly if it might be a good idea. And because, let's face it, the old motorway (it was finished this summer) doesn't really work any more. But the money needed to complete the current roads programme, the famous "financial envelope" of €1.4 billion a year over the next five years, also needs to be part of Mr Cullen's plan. Which prompts the question: what is left in Mr Cullen's plan that the economists are running their slide rule over? Could it be the railways?

We have embarked on something akin to the mathematical theory of limits. At mind-numbing expense we upgrade our roads, they attract traffic, and when journey times lengthen we upgrade again - apparently at twice the original cost for about half the initial benefit.

And still the Sligo train chugs out of Connolly Station, covering the distance to Boyle in about three hours - as it did a half-a-century ago.