Roads and rail: both are needed in the West
The Western Rail Corridor between Limerick and Galway has enjoyed great success since it re-opened in 2010.
Adrian Langan makes some particularly good points in his April 11th article ('Roads, not rail, must be the West’s priority'). For example, the inadequate nature of the existing N17 that links Sligo southwards into Mayo (specifically, serving Connacht’s dynamic Ireland West Airport), Galway and further south, the need for a robust road system along the entire Atlantic coast linking Derry, Sligo, Galway, Limerick and Cork to provide a counter-balance to the dominance of the current hub-and-spoke motorway and rail systems centred on and emanating from Dublin and the essential facilitating role played by transport infrastructure if the economy of the Northwest region is to prosper and the scattered smallish towns of the region are to grow.
However, I differ from Mr Langan when he presents the choice between road and rail as an either-or decision, presumably because he believes that it would be difficult enough to win political support for any one of the two, but probably impossible to win support for both. So he plumps for road on the basis of its greater short-term flexibility compared to rail. In fact, we need both rail and roads.
There is a better way to work towards achieving Mr Langan’s goals of greater economic prosperity in the N&W region but on a phased basis. Since the ability to win political approval is easier when costs are modest and results can be produced quickly, let’s start with rail. The Western Rail Corridor (WRC) originally linked Cork, Limerick, Galway, Mayo and Sligo, but many services were terminated in the 1980s and Mayo-Limerick freight in 2000.
The Limerick-Galway link was reopened in 2010 and is now the fastest-growing rail service in the entire Irish rail network, even though it runs alongside the horrendously expensive and environmentally destructive M18 motorway. Happily, a decision to reopen the WRC rail link from Athenry to Claremorris is imminent, initially for freight but soon for passengers. And the costs of restoring the entire WRC? Much less than a kilometre or two of Dublin’s Metro-North or a few more kilometres of top-grade motorway.
Deputy Eamon Ryan, Minister for Transport, declared at a meeting in Sligo in May last year that there would be no further funding for either the N17 or for restoring the Claremorris-Collooney rail line, and that the people of Sligo could be gifted a greenway on the rail line as a kind of consolation prize. Perhaps the Green Party will rue that rash and ill-considered decision when the election campaign starts up later in the year.
The problem that Mr Langan identified in his article is even more serious than he believes. The real political choice being addressed by our Dublin-centred government is not road versus rail for the West. Rather, it is between a focused regional development policy to re-balance the Irish economy versus a continuation of the present system that favours the eastern and southern regions and starves the North and Western (N&W) region of serious infrastructural investment. And I have bad news for Mr Langan. Efforts to get the Dublin policy-makers to take regional development seriously are falling on deaf ears and the “five city” model (actually, “one city”) continues to dominate the policy agenda.
There is a better way to present the development needs of the N&W region than reducing it to roads versus rail. A new report to be published shortly takes up the challenge of examining the nature of underdevelopment in the mid-N&W region and the fact that growth of towns in the immediate catchment area of the Claremorris-Collooney line in north Mayo and south Sligo has been much lower than in towns in mid and south Mayo and north Galway. It shows that the region supports an impressive manufacturing and traded services culture, but that the enterprise sector is constrained with respect to future growth by inadequate transport infrastructure.
It will also draw attention to the need for a far more searching analysis of how the economies of peripheral counties like Mayo and Sligo actually function. The N&W Regional Assembly Regional Spatial and Economic Strategy has recommended that priority focus in the region needs to include strengthening inter-regional connectivity, through the improvement of inter-urban road and rail connectivity, with a particular emphasis on improved connectivity between the largest urban centres and access to ports and airports. But there is also a need for greater intra-regional rail connectivity that could be provided by the restoration of the full Western Rail Corridor combined with improvements to local roads and a reorganised bus service to connect with railway stations.
Two bodies that are hugely important to the enhanced development of Mayo and Sligo are Ireland West Airport and the Atlantic Technological University (ATU). The airport acts as an international airport link to a wide population catchment area in the N&W region and has the potential to function as an air-freight hub. The airport needs to be made accessible by rail through a shuttle bus service operating from Charlestown station on a restored Claremorris-Collooney line. The ATU is targeted towards promoting and supporting regional development and educating the future labour force of the region. Restored rail links connecting Sligo, Mayo and Galway would facilitate student interchanges between the different ATU campuses and create a wider travel-to-work area to service future industries in the region.
People in the West need to start thinking deeply about how their region can develop and catch up with the more prosperous east and south. They had better start now because the Dublin government is not going to do it for them.
