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Seanad
‹ Order of Business

Metro and green line confusion

Summary

Senator McDowell queried the State capital programme and sought clarity on whether the proposed metro scheme would replace or absorb the green line, and what would happen to newly purchased trams. He asked the Leader to bring in the Transport Minister to explain the plan.

The Leader of the House is presumed to know everything on these occasions and to be able to answer everything. There has been great fanfare over the announcement of the State capital programme recently. It suddenly struck me that I was listening to a proposal for a metro system for Dublin that was no longer to involve metro north but metro north and south. There are statements that it will surface somewhere near where I live, in Ranelagh, but that does not indicate my purpose in asking this question.

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David P.B. Norris Senator David Norris Independent

They will take one look and go underground again.

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Does this mean the green line will effectively be abolished and transformed into a rail line that goes underground somewhere in leafy Ranelagh? Will there be a green line anymore? Nobody has been able to explain this.

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Maybe the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport will.

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Are all the long trams we are now buying to be redundant or what is to happen to them? The Leader knows everything so I ask my question in a spirit of curiosity.

Will the Leader ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport or a Minister of State at that Department to come into the House to explain to us whether the green line will be abolished as part of this process, whether tram and metro carriages will share the same lines and whether we will have yet more lines? While there is great fanfare about all of these matters, there is absolute lack of clarity on what precisely is meant. Will the tramline along Dawson Street end somewhere like St. Stephen's Green, for example? All of these things are a bit of a mystery and before we get wildly enthusiastic about programmes, it would be interesting to know whether the current complexities in Dublin due to the lengthening of trams on the green line and the extension of the line to Broombridge are a purely temporary phenomenon, whether we are to have an entirely new transport solution and whether both solutions will coexist on the same tracks.

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