FG Ard Fheis

[Mark Hennessy]

Great to hear Olivia go on about roads, roads, road building and erm roads!
We can be assured, according to Olivia that there will be no private funded roads and the public will pay for them all. If there is a downturn in the economy we will pay for our roads by taking from the pension reserve fund (!!).
No mention of public transit to my knowledge.
Well im a roving voter but i'll save my time and not read any of the FG literature next year

[Mark Gleeson]

Olivia might not even be on the front bench anyway, Greens are getting transport if it happens

[Mark Hennessy]

Originally Posted by Mark Gleeson

Olivia might not even be on the front bench anyway, Greens are getting transport if it happens

Free bicycles for all or have the greens actually grasped what public transit is about? I'll go look at their website.

[Mark Gleeson]

The Green live in La La land but to be fair compared to Olivia they can't be worse

[Mark Hennessy]

http://www.finegael.ie/fine-gael-new...r/2006/month/5

Hmmm, looks like I may have been a bit unfair to the author of Olivia's speach.
The news reports ( which carried it as the number 1 item ) focused solely on the 2nd part of her speach which was exclusively about roads. It seems public transit just isnt news-worthy in this country

Although Olivia still doesnt know what she is talking about when it comes to the interconnector, this despite me emailing her, and Barry Kenny writing in the Irish Times letters pages over the course of a few days.

The motion from the Lucan Branch calls for an integrated public transport system for Dublin based on fast, high capacity commuter rail services.

Fine Gael will deliver this, not just promise it. We recognise the time for timid solutions is long past. We need the big investments in rail, in Metro and LUAS. Our population and our economy demand it. We will plan for delivery with energy and determination. We will deliver on time and on budget.

We also have to start thinking outside the box for early answers, at school transport solutions in our cities, for instance, that would keep thousands of cars off our streets each morning. We need to look at innovative uses of rural school buses so they can offer additional transport solutions for more remote areas.

This Government has never been short on promises, or press conferences or photo-calls. They enchant us with announcements like the ambitious underground interconnector rail tunnel. Yet, they are unwilling or incapable of opening up the existing Phoenix Park tunnel to the city.

[Mark Gleeson]

She is at it again and doesn't understand

Park Tunnel is not a capacity enhancement and doesn't actually increase the net inbound or outbound capacity, its about getting people closer to the city without a change

Before Heuston was rebuilt it had a capacity advantage but no longer is that the case. The fundmanetal limit is the 2 tracks between Inchicore and Le Fanu Rd under the KRP, Park tunnel doesn't address that. Interconnector would provide a massive capacity increase since it avoids all this

[philip]

Just watching the FG Ard Fheis (I've come to the conclusion that Olivia Mitchell is pretty inconsequential in all this to be honest) and if it wasn't for their party leader I could vote for them. I will certainly have to thnk about it. The bist that scares me is Labour and they're likelihood to pander to the unions in CIE even more than the present shower. Decisions decisions eh?

[Mark Hennessy]

if it wasn't for their party leader I could vote for them.

Thats a big prob for FG I feel, they have shed a lot of the idiotic policies of Noonans FG and are now reaching out with some good 'common sense' policies.
I've met the chap before and he really is as limp in person as he
comes across on tv. There are brick walls with more charisma.

[Mark Gleeson]

Simply put Lowry Greystones by election thats where it all went wrong

[Kevin K Kelehan]

What I found most interesting from the Ard Fheis was the high profile of Alan Shatter the former TD for Dublin South and Minister.

As Mark G rightly points out there isn't any chance of Olivia Mitchell being transport minister after the next election regardless of which coalition wins.

Without wishing to sound harsh there is quite a high chance that Olivia won't even be a TD after the next election given the tendency in politics for the sympathy vote which Shatter will receive following his 2002 loss (his first since elected in 1982) This is one of the tightest constituencies in the State with the only certainty being Tom Kitt of Fianna Fail after that one has

Che Breannan
Olivia Mitchell
Eamon Ryan
Liz O'Donnell
Alan Shatter
Eithne Fitzgerald

As we all know 6 into 4 does not go and my suspicion is that the next transport minister will come from this constituency but will be Eamon Ryan who has done a bit of a 'new green party'

[sean]

Well, having a Green minister of transport should help us out a bit on the old road vs. public transport imbalance the present shower has been running.

[Kevin K Kelehan]

There will certainly be no mosherways outside of the NDP core programme should Ryan be made minister.

I don't think that one can regard Ryan as a stereotypical Green per se; he is a highly pragmatic individual that would be equally at home in any of the rainbow parties given his business acumen and environmental credentials.

I don't think that Ryan would penalise the National Inter-Urban roads programme however projects such as the Eastern By-pass and further commuter dual-carriageways & Motorways would be unlikely to be built with the equivelent money put into rail projects.

[dermo88]

So Jeffrey, Bungle, Gordon and Zippy unveil their transport plans.

The coalition of the worthless and clueless.

Fianna Fail are going to monopolise power in Ireland only because their potential rivals are only useful for appearing on childrens TV by comparison.

If Fianna Fail are bad for railway planning, then please never forget that Fine Gael and Labour combined are a cancer to rail transport in Ireland.

They'll speak their populist ideas at their Ard Fheis. But when they have power, they'll go through the semi states "Like a dose of salts".

The DART to Greystones.

"No new investment in the railways", a policy which almost culminated in corporate manslaughter at knockcroghery on a Saturday morning in 1997. Luckily for them, the rail did not crack a mere 12 hours earlier.

It was left to Mary O'Rourke to mop up the toilet there, and she did a good job of it.

I've stated my opinions on what I thought of Olivia Mitchells transport ideas before in graphic, offensive and no uncertain terms.

What she knows about transport can be written on the back of a postage stamp. She'll be fine with a Ministerial Merc and driver. No need to take a LUAS, DART or commuter train.

I'll take the corrupt ones who run their transport policy from a Beer tent at the Galway races and maybe get something, rather than the honest ones who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, because with Jeffrey, Bungle, Gordon and Zippy you may as well be painting rainbows.

[Kevin K Kelehan]

In relation to Knockcroghery please do not insult our intelligence stating that Irish railways went down hill solely in the 2.5 years that FF were out of office.

Lets not forget that FF had been power for eight of the previous ten years and had invested even less than the rainbow had in rail.

[dermo88]

Well, lets just say, in the case of Fine Gael from Mitchells tenure onwards the railways suffered from wilful neglect. Under Lowry it was politically motivated, demoralising, spiteful neglect. We are lucky that Lowry did not last long as transport minister as I have no doubt that politically motivated closures would have taken place under his tenure.

Under Fianna Fail, you got plain neglect.

But so did everything else in the country, from schools, to hospitals, to roads. Railways were not alone. There was'nt a penny in the country, and so much tax revenue was there paying interest servicing the national debt.

[Mark Gleeson]

Infrastructure investment has a 5 to 10 year delivery timescale which isn't compatible with getting in at the next election

Put brutally killing and injuring people results in investment thats the only constant

[dermo88]

I have to agree on that Mark. It took Dalkey to make them fork out for DART. It took the Cherryville and Buttevant disasters to get them to put the cash down and buy the Mark III fleet. It took Knockcroghery to get them to put the cash down and rebuild the track. Now all it needs is a nice property crash, and there won't be any revenue around for 30 years. The railways will have their nice slow managed decline and neglect again if that happens.

Or have they actually learned anything. The whole aspect of infrastructural development in Ireland is reactive, rather than proactive.

What is it going to take to make them built the Interconnector. The Clonsilla to Navan link, and whats it going to take to make them do it witout 10% of the funds being siphoned away to the Friends of Fianna Fail slush fund.

That buys a lot of kegs for that Beer tent at Galway. A lot of Beer at Cheltenham. Plenty left over to put into the bookies satchels as well.

Its a great little nation. If we evade our taxes, we go to jail. If they evade their taxes, they get a tribunal. If dodgy contracts are awarded, or projects go over budget.....its a tribunal.

Haughey is gone, long live Haugheyism.

[Mark Gleeson]

The funding for DART predates the Dalkey accident there was the Gormonston accident several years before, there where numerous incidents where the AEC push pull control cars used to go on fire.

Thankfully from what I can see EU contracting and tendering has killed off the shady deals, the costs of IE's projects are inline with best practice.

Politicans are a problem, now on one side the bean counters cant justify the spend before you can show proof, I saw things degrade on a daily basis but it takes 3 years to get kit from drawing board to service

CIE property are going to make €200 million over the next 10 years out of Horgans Quay in Cork, we don't know what Spencer Dock is but its a little known fact that IE have debt over over €170 million

[Kevin K Kelehan]

Originally Posted by dermo88

Well, lets just say, in the case of Fine Gael from Mitchells tenure onwards the railways suffered from wilful neglect.

Why start with Mitchell?

Lets go back to the real start 1925 and the period after the civil war that saw the last real maintenance of the entire rail network. Until 1983 there was no planned repalcement of track which led to most lines being dangerous by any standard.

One can credit FF under Andrews for introducing new rolling stock; however DRTS was from 1974 when the Rainbow were in power which dissapeared in 1977 when Lynch took office; DART and the Mark 3 fleet were from the 1980's rainbow as was the CWR from Heuston to Cork; the enterprise and Kildare Commuter line were introduced under a Labour government in the early 1990's.

If you want to compare Lowrey on Greystones use the M3 it will cost excess €800m and serve a more or less equivelent population.

[Mark]

So what you are saying Kevin is that Rainbow Governments work better for Railways?