Dart Delay 'Body Blow' For Ballymun – FF

A Fianna Fáil Councillor has described the three-year delay to the development of the Dart and Metro North services as a "body blow" for North Dublin.

Responding to the Government announcement made on Wednesday, Paul McAuliffe said the delay in the Metro North project was a "major body blow" for the Ballymun Regeneration Project and would mean the serious delay of other investment projects in the area, including the proposed Ballymun shopping centre and the M50 Wet Labs.

“The Metro North project which has already consumed almost €200 million could have relied more heavily on private funding rather than government capital spending," Mr McAuliffe said.

He added: "The Railway Procurement Agency has estimated that more than 3600 jobs might have been created and in a time of increasing unemployment it seems crazy to turn down that sort of job creation opportunity."

On Wednesday, the Labour Minister for Transport announced the plans for the Metro North and Dart Underground service were to be delayed along with a "significant" scaling back of investment in transport infrastructure over the next five years.

Leo Varadkar said the delay was needed to allow the Government to meet its commitments in health and education, restore "economic sovereignty", and keep taxes down.

Mr Varadkar said: “The Government is making these cutbacks in order to honour our commitments to the people and to the troika to bring the budget deficit to 3% of the GDP by 2015 so that Ireland’s economic sovereignty can be restored. It will also assist us to honour our commitments to keep income taxes down and maintain basic social welfare rates."

Mr Varadkar said given that the Government already had a large number of "shovel-ready" projects, which have been suspended until after 2016, there was little point in spending more money on planning new projects.

However, the Fine Fail Councillor rejected these assertions saying the timing of the North Dublin infrastructural cuts was particularly disappointing ahead of next week’s International conference in Dublin City University entitled ‘The Green Way –Ireland’s Clean-tech cluster’.

"This constituency elected two Labour government TDs, one of whom is a government Minister, both of whom made promises to secure the future of Metro North. Today’s news demonstrates that they have failed miserably.”

(DW)