Gavan Reilly: Metro Link and airport rail saga doesn’t bode well for Navan

Hello again, Metro Link! No doubt in some of the national press you’ll have seen reports today about the amazing new high-speed rail service being built to link Dublin Airport - poor, creaking, understaffed, soon-to-be-militarised Dublin Airport - with the city centre, and underground connections running every three minutes at peak times.

The project now is likely to cost €9.5 billion - or, at least, that’s the middle-of-the-road projection. Officially the Government doesn’t know what it’ll cost, until it actually goes out and looks for people to tender to build it. But it’s already estimating that the project will be somewhere between €7.16 billion and €12.25 billion - so it’s simply offering a figure somewhere in the middle.

That cost is far higher than it ought to be - the cheapest time to build any infrastructure is ten years ago; the next-cheapest time is today - but at least it’s now happening. It’s a wonder that nobody has suggested deploying the Army to build the line, given how the deployment of the Defence Forces is everyone’s favourite solution for a public crisis.

But what’s more striking is the sloppy timetable for the project. The preliminary business case has now been adopted by Cabinet, with a plan to lodge a planning application this autumn. Construction, however, won’t begin until 2025 - and the line won’t be operational until 2031 at the very earliest.

The only thing is: you may remember the then-transport minister Martin Cullen, in 2002, promising that the line would be up and running by 2007. And the relative lack of urgency about this plan, doesn’t breed much confidence for the speediness of other lines. If the Metro process begins now and runs in 2031, how long will it take for Navan to get one? And why isn’t it closer to the top of the queue, when Meath is the only county where a majority of workers have to leave the county?