While I am sure a DART is more energy efficient than a diesel, I am not so sure that the journey time differential would be as great as you suggest.
If you go back to the late 1950s, the journey time (all stops) Bray to Westland Row was 45 minutes compared to today's 39 minutes. Admittedly there are now two additional stations (Shankill and Grand Canal Dock), but then diesel performance in the 1950s hardly matches today's much more advanced machines.
Certainly on the northside, when modern diesel railcars were substituted for DARTs on a number of occasions in the mid 1990s, the actual diesel journey time was less than the advertised DART journey time, largely because the diesel driver was not forced to crawl up to restrictive signals positioned just beyond a station he was stopping at in any case.
Un-necessarily degraded DART performance with consequent journey time penalty is experienced on the southside at Booterstown, Sydney Parade, Sandymount, Lansdowne Road, Bray etc etc ...
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