[PR] Minister Varadkar seeks public’s views on NRA/RPA merger

[weehamster]

I disagree with this proposed merger. A waste of time if you ask me.

I believe that the NRA should be the sole authority over every aspect that is to do with roads, national and local, taking away responsibility from local councils (if I had my way I would merge all of the local councils in one national council but that is a totally different argument for another time and place).

The NTA is be the sole authority over every aspect of public transport (planes, trains, trams, buses, taxies, hackneys, ferries etc). No CIE, RPA, IAA, no other sub agencies. Just one authority.

Both of these authorities should have real powers and should be the only ones who have a say in which projects should or shouldn't go ahead, stopping politicians using transport to paint themselves in a better light to their voters at the expense of needed projects. If we had this years ago, we'll probably have a city wide metro network called the DART instead of the single line we have now. (It sickens me to think that over 25 years after the
DART first started that we still only have one line).

Also I believe we should also have a single National Safety Authority that is in charge of all Roads, Public transport, Aviation and Marine safety, again replacing the likes of the RSA, RSC etc.

[Mark Gleeson]

Under EU law you have to separate infrastructure from operations so you can't have an all over agency, so you end up with infrastructure design/construct/maintenance agency and an operations agency which contracts out the services. We would very much like this

You should be able to have a single transport safety investigation agency and that is happening and to be located in Drogheda.

[Colm Moore]

Originally Posted by weehamster

I believe that the NRA should be the sole authority over every aspect that is to do with roads, national and local, taking away responsibility from local councils (if I had my way I would merge all of the local councils in one national council but that is a totally different argument for another time and place).

I hear what you are saying, but you risk a HSE situation where the organisation is too big (100,000+ employees) and tends to report only to itself. While hospitals are nominally independent, they aren't really.

What one needs is a high level supervisory authority and appropriately sized organisations that do service delivery.