Speaking at the launch of a £73 million programme of public expenditure on the railway system yesterday, the Minister for Transport and Communications, Mr Lowry, frankly acknowledged that the level of service on the mainline railway system in this State is "appalling". He correctly blamed "gross under investment" for this lamentable state of affairs, a circumstance which will be reversed in part by yesterday's welcome announcement of improvements to three of the major national lines and an extension of the DART system to Greystones and Malahide. The announcement provides an opportunity to assess the indispensable role of public expenditure in providing the communications infrastructure on which so much economic activity depends.
The railway system has been very much the poor relation of Ireland's transport system; it has become the beneficiary of structural and cohesion funds from the European Union, which provide some 85 per cent of the investment announced by Mr Lowry. Certainly it has been right to allocate a substantial proportion of these funds to the railway network, but one may quarrel with Mr Lowry's assumption that without them it would not be possible to make the investments required. The fact is that transport is such a fundamental requisite of modern economies that it must command a much higher domestic priority than it has been allocated by Irish governments, whether they are dealing with railway or road systems.
The EU funds are predicated precisely on this fact. They are intended to reduce the geographical and economic peripherality of this State as it enters into a European single market and currency and to facilitate its development compared to the European heartlands. Anyone returning from there to travel on Irish roads or railways knows immediately how much there is to be done, despite the strong comparative growth record of the Irish economy in the last few years. The main artery roads and rail lines in this State are still far behind the European average and there is much ground to be made up in the remaining period in which these funds will flow so strongly. Thereafter it would be well to plan from now for a national endeavour to bridge the outstanding gaps, as core states have been doing for several decades.
The point applies as much to the national road network and to city traffic systems as to the railways that were highlighted in yesterday's announcement. Residents of Malahide and Greystones will be delighted by the news that the DART system is to be extended to them. Those who live along the proposed LUAS routes can also look forward to better public transport, though Mr Lowry says the decision to proceed with just two of the three identified routes is without prejudice to the European Commission's report on whether Ballymun should be included in the scheme, and, indeed, whether on further reflection it should be extended to Dublin Airport. Neither transport users not voters should be misled by politicians' assertions that such decisions depend on EU approval. They must be made on national and domestic grounds and priorities, as is argued in a series of articles on the Dublin light rail system beginning in this newspaper today. These are, indeed, the criteria on which the Brussels decision makers themselves should operate. Voters should ask themselves which set of decision makers has the better priorities, thereby putting it up to the Government to justify its transport policy on national grounds rather than simply by the availability of transfer funding.