God, but this country makes you feel old. Last week, on hearing that Martin Cullen is to establish a Dublin Transportation Authority, I had a flashback to the first time I interviewed a Fianna Fáil minister about the establishment of a Dublin Transportation Authority, writes Fintan O'Toole
The Jam's Going Underground was on the radio. The Empire Strikes Back was on the big screens. The minister in question was an up-and-coming politician called Albert Reynolds. I was 22, and writing for In Dublin magazine. I had no glasses and a full head of very long hair. The year was 1980 - a quarter of a century ago.
We've been stuck in a traffic jam for a very long time, moving every now and then towards a dead end, before reversing back into the gridlock, going nowhere fast.
The long-running farce of transport policy in Ireland gives the lie to the notion that having one party in government most of the time ensures the kind of long-term continuity that is necessary for strategic thinking. Shortly before it established the DTA in 1980, Fianna Fáil came out against it. In 1977, when the three Dublin local authorities called for the creation of a single co-ordinating body to oversee transport in the capital, the then minister, Padraig Faulkner, told the Dáil it would not "create a more efficient or economic service".
Within three years, the party's view had completely changed, and within 10 years it had come full circle.
The DTA was established by Albert Reynolds and was beginning to get to grips with the long-term problems by the mid-1980s. When Fianna Fáil came back into power in 1987, however, the DTA was almost immediately abolished. The decision was made, ostensibly, to save money. At the time, the DTA's annual budget for current and capital purposes was £665,000 - a pittance even then. When it was put to him in the Dáil that the saving was "minuscule" , the then transport minister John Wilson replied: "Minuscule it may be, but I am reminded of the Scottish proverb - many a mickle makes a muckle." That is as close as we ever got to an explanation for a decision to split control over transport between various local and national bodies, thus making an integrated transport policy impossible.
Fast forward then to 2002, and the Fianna Fáil/PD programme for government. The DTA is back: "We will introduce legislation to establish a new Greater Dublin Land Use and Transport Authority with a strong mandate to bring greater focus and better co-ordination to the implementation of this strategy and to land-use and transport issues generally." This is a pretty clear commitment, and it followed, moreover, from a joint proposal by the Departments of the Environment and Public Enterprise, contained in a document called New Institutional Arrangements for Land-Use and Transport in the Greater Dublin Area, published in April 2001. So, as of 2002, both the Government and the civil service were strongly committed to the establishment of the DTA. The inter-
departmental paper, moreover, had stressed that all the preparatory work was done and that legislation would be drafted for autumn 2001. So four years ago, the proposal was revved up and ready to roll.
What happened? For a while, nothing at all. And then the Government went into reverse yet again. There was to be no DTA after all. Less than two years ago, the then minister for transport, Séamus Brennan, told the Dáil that the Government had changed its mind and was going to break the commitment made in the Programme for Government. The non-statutory Dublin Transport Office, whose powers are extremely limited, was, he claimed "continuing to carry out effective strategic transport planning for the Greater Dublin Area".
Thus "policy objectives of effective land use and transport planning can, for the present, be successfully addressed within these existing structures. I do not, therefore, believe that it is a priority to establish a strategic land use and transportation authority for the Greater Dublin Area." What was unnecessary in 2004 is vital in 2005 and the DTA is back on the agenda.
Over the course of 25 years, therefore, Fianna Fáil policy on the DTA has been a traffic light - stop, go, stop, go, stop, go. And it is not clear even now that a definitive decision has been made. Alert readers may have noticed that the commitment in the 2002 Programme for Government was to establish a "Greater Dublin Land Use and Transport Authority".
The land use bit is crucial. The inter-departmental paper on which the proposal is based rightly stressed the need to address transport and spatial planning together: "The critical interdependence of land use and transport planning became very clear during the work on the Strategic Planning Guidelines and it is therefore considered essential that they be addressed by the same strategic body."
But it is not at all clear that the body Martin Cullen is now proposing will in fact be able to make this "critical" and "essential" connection. After a quarter of a century of indecision and misgovernment, we have to wait with more hope than expectation for the train to that distant town called Competence.