Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

If I had to guess, probably about 40-45 minutes

Precisely, the online commentariat are largely bitter people trying to fill some parasocial hole in their lives with constant complaining and screaming into the void, best to pay them little heed.

Glasnevin Station will be class if Irish Rail and ML can work together effectively

Hugely sceptical of this and forgive me for being so. Giving timelines to commence 3 years from now gives a lot of space to back out. It's electioneering PR bluster.

Start digging in the next 6 months and I will believe it. Very frustrating that this project is not well underway. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet , borrow big and move forward with capital infrastructure projects. It will pay itself off in the long run. The project should run 24/7 to speed up completion. We are not good at that in Ireland.

The comparison with Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) in London has been mentioned. Crossrail is roughly twice the cost of the proposed Metrolink North. Crossrail has two 21km long tunnels and the total length of the project stretched for 73 miles (almost 120km), the trains are full-scale heavy rail and quite long which makes for huge stations. Metrolink is 19km long in total, and in relation to Lodon's huge and very complex project looks insanely expensive.

I'd like to see some project managers from the Madrid, Lisbon or Porto metros (all with current or recent projects) have a look at this. I suspect that their comments would be unprintable.

Part of the problem seems to be that the NTA has no real experience in building anything; they are totally dependent on consultants, who of course are paid to tell the NTA what they want to know. Give the engineers in Irish Rail the job of designing a revamped Dart Underground plus an Airport link, and you just might see something which makes sense and seriously complements existing infrastructure.

Brian Dobson was talking to Eamonn Ryan on the RTE Radio 1 news, earlier.

He mentioned that Ryan was now the fourth minister for transport to announce that Thunderbirds are GO! for the Metro project. They even played a clip of Mary O Rourke (remember back that far) talking about how quickly it will be running and how tickets will be integrated with existing road and rail public transport systems.

We do eventually 'kind of' have an integrated ticketing system, although being Ireland we had to invent our own version with its own particular peculiarities. I won't be holding my breath to see how this announcement goes - too many undelivered promises in the past and our track record (pun intended) is not good on big infrastructure delivery.

It should have been done years ago, should certainly be done now, but I don't think the powers that decide have the skill set to do so... or to ensure that we don't get an overly expensive and much delayed, half arsed job.

Once bitten, and then bitten again and again.... twice shy. :)

And what experience does Irish Rail engineers have in metro construction pray tell? DART airport link is non viable due to capacity constraints on approach to Connolly, put a spur in and suddenly you're looking at best 30 min frequency to Airport, Malahide and Howth before you try and slot in outer commuter services to Drogheda and the Enterprise.

the main risk to this is a change of government. For SF this will be a FFG white elephant and as soon as they need money for something else this will be "paused" then cancelled.

The €9.5b figure may be more realistic than some of the figures that have bandied about in the past but it also waves a giant flag over the project that says "cancel me".

This is very vulnerable to a change of government and a new Transport Minister looking to reinvent the wheel.

Good to see this gaining traction and moving ahead, albeit slowly.

But, assuming it's not mothballed again, just wait until they need to start CPOing properties around the city, especially that fully occupied apartment block at Tara street. With practically nowhere for people to live, that is when the real fun starts.

Sorry but the third line is EXACTLY why this project is needed. Dublin can't cope with the current levels of traffic and poor public transport, and especially coming from Dublin Airport. Diverting €10bn away to Cork or Limerick won't suddenly make all the multinationals and people living in Dublin move there instead, and somehow turn Cork into the new transport link to mainland Europe, that's just incredibly wishful thinking and silly logic. Metrolink is as big a no brainer a public infrastructure project as there is. No other major European capital is lacking a rail link to the city centre.

Also, why does everything have to be "don't spend this money on Dublin, spend it on other cities instead!". Why can't we do both? It shouldn't be one or the other. You're all mad, like it or not Dublin is our capital and one of Europe's main financial and tech hubs. We can't simply pump money into far more rural areas instead.

I have been riding this metro train concept train for 20 years (metaphorically) and all I have ever witnessed is new CGI. I am not negative for the sake of it I can assure you. I am negative because I know the Irish Establishment have proved themselves consistently to be lying psychopathic scum who have toyed with us all on underground rail issues for as many decade as I have been alive.

My negativity is born out of experience, not knee-jerk cynicism I can assure you. In 1973, as a schoolboy I walked out of the Young Scientists Exhibition after being spellbound by the CIE stand fully convinced Dublin was getting an underground train system. Slag me off all you want. But this has been a weary and long road for me.

Thanks, I forgot to add TII to the alphabet soup of transport bodies. Incidentally TII have a lot to say about Motorways, LUAS, and now Metrolink. Where is ordinary heavy rail investment in all of this? In some other countries, the equivalent of TII have responsibility of strategic road and rail developments. It's called joined-up thinking.