A secret of the Irish state is buried beneath Dublin airport. It’s underground, but you can walk into it. You might even have used it when travelling.
It’s a check-in overflow area now, but that’s not the purpose the hall, known as Area 14, was built for. Its extra high ceilings give it away: it was supposed to be a metro station. But that promise has never been fulfilled.
Dublin’s inability to build a metro, a staple of any modern capital city, has become a Kafkaesque nightmare. Repeated attempts have been made across decades, yet there’s still no high capacity transport system in Ireland's largest city.
Errors of omission are less obvious than errors of commission. They’re hard to see, and hard to remember. A metro would have totally changed the history of Dublin and the region – it would have been of enormous benefit to its people, the environment, and even the aspirations of the whole nation.
So how did we get here?
The back story
Early twentieth century Dublin was struggling. There were widespread concerns about slums, with unsanitary conditions in overcrowded buildings causing disease. Working class housing in the city wasn’t properly managed, with many properties left to decay until they collapsed, killing their inhabitants.
The city’s elites knew something had to change. Town planning had just begun to develop as a discipline, and it was often competitive (it even featured in early editions of the Olympics). A planning competition was launched for Dublin in 1914, and the winner was announced two years later.
The winning entry was compiled by Patrick Abercrombie, Professor of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool. He proposed thousands of new homes in Dublin’s suburbs, and even in lands owned by Dublin port. Influenced by European planning, especially Haussman’s Paris, transportation was at the heart of his vision – including an underground rail service.
This is the earliest proposal for a metro in Dublin’s history. It came before even the founding of the state. The idea was ambitious, but hardly absurd: by 1916 thirteen cities worldwide had some kind of underground system, including nearby London (1863) and Glasgow (1896). Plus, Ireland has had a long history of rail innovation: the world’s first commuter rail service ran between Dublin and Kingstown (modern Dún Laoghaire), and the rest of the country saw a rail network established in the mid-nineteenth century, soon after England’s.
Even at this early stage, the value of Dublin for the whole country was obvious to planners. From the report’s 1922 foreword:
“Dublin, from its geographical position and lines of communication, is the natural commercial gateway to the greater part of Ireland, and should be treated as a National, and not merely a local, asset.”
A proper transportation network in Dublin would benefit the whole country – this remains true today.
However, the Abercrombie vision was never realised. The early Irish state wasn’t an economic success and the case for a metro was weak when compared to other priorities, like electrification through the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme.
By the middle of the twentieth century, cars and buses seemed like the future. Robert Moses was building dozens of roads and bridges in New York and the US federal government was spending hundreds of billions on its interstate highway system.
But as the years rolled on, the logic of a metro became more and more obvious. In the early 1970s four new towns were proposed for the Dublin suburbs, connected to the city via rapid transit. Underground portions would run from Connolly to Heuston and Broadstone to Sandymount. Forty cities worldwide now had an underground system; Dublin couldn’t be far behind.
Parts of this project were realised, but not the underground, which was ultimately stymied by the 1980s financial downturn.
As a new century rolled around, Ireland was booming and a Dublin metro seemed within sight once again. The Dublin Metro Group consortium including Japanese conglomerates Mitsui and Nishimatsu even offered to design, build, finance, operate and maintain a metro system running from Sandyford to Dublin airport and Tallaght for a lump sum. (The Cabinet opted for the Luas scheme instead.)
A new plan was proposed yet again in 2001. This time the metro was dubbed an ‘interconnector’ that would link Heuston Station with East Wall junction via Pearse Station and Docklands. At either end of the underground section trains would emerge to become an overground service.
This plan was eagerly embraced by the Dublin Transportation Office, and planning permission was granted by An Bord Pleanala – but not until October 2011. A month later, with Ireland in the financial doldrums yet again, the government lacked the funds to pursue the interconnector project and postponed it.
The past decade has seen a series of false starts. Relaunches in 2015 as “Metro North” and 2018 as “MetroLink” (now including a route to the airport) never got beyond the public consultation stage, then in 2019 the route was changed again. The current application was submitted to An Bord Pleanala in 2022, and Minister O’Brien has publicly indicated a railway order will be issued later this year. Given the scale of the project, however, judicial reviews are likely to follow.
And the risk remains that once legal obstacles are overcome, the economic cycle will have turned and the government will cancel the project to save money.
Why a metro matters
Excuses for a poor transport situation in Dublin can be made for the lean years of the 1970s; they cannot be made in the modern era when the Irish government has run successive surpluses and spent money elsewhere.
A metro would be a boon for Dublin. Commuters could get around the city more quickly, wasting less time in traffic and improving quality of life. Productivity would increase. More people could live and work in the city, where the best paying jobs and careers await. The city could become denser, which would allow more agglomeration effects and a larger labour market, thus boosting the economy further.
The outer suburbs of Dublin could be developed, allowing us to build more homes where they’re needed (and where they’re less controversial). Walkability would increase and lifestyles would become more active, and we’d all reap the environmental benefits of a shift away from car dependence.
If you need proof, see the areas of urban density below. The south-eastern part of Dublin grew along the rail corridor to Greystones. By contrast, western settlements like Naas and Lucan didn’t have commuter-friendly rail services, so didn’t grow to the same degree.
As each year passes, Ireland’s failure to build a metro compounds. It becomes harder to do infrastructure projects over time: the city develops in other ways and land that would have been cheap to acquire early on becomes more expensive. People get used to the character of their area. But the case for the metro grows stronger in parallel: as the surface of a city becomes more and more busy, it becomes increasingly difficult to scale transportation without going underground.
Ireland ranks poorly internationally in terms of its infrastructure, and the lack of a metro is a key part of that. Compare Dublin to Madrid, for instance:
In 1995, the Madrid Metro was 71 miles (114 kilometers) long… Over the course of the next 12 years, the metro grew by 126 miles (203 kilometers), nearly tripling in length.
In other words, Madrid has tripled the length of its existing network while Dublin has launched several different plans for a metro.
The chart below indicates that Dublin is easily at the size where a metro is needed. 86 per cent of cities Dublin’s size and above have a metro.
For another international comparison, submit Dublin to this anecdotal test: how many capital city airports in Europe only have car or bus access to the city? A country that is unable to do the basics of modern development properly is not a good advertisement to visiting businesspeople and tourists.
Getting real
Ireland’s metro nightmare offers two lessons.
First, if Ireland’s planning process remains slow, large-scale infrastructure will always be at risk of cancellation when the next recession rolls around. Positively, An Bord Pleanála has been clearing its backlog and the new planning bill may also speed things up.
Second, as Madrid’s example demonstrates, ‘learning by doing’ is the way forward. In other words, we shouldn’t conceive of the metro as a once in a lifetime project. Instead we should build a network gradually and steadily, absorbing lessons as we go and saving money overall.
Taking the next step in Ireland’s development means getting transport right in our most important city. The only thing worse than not having a metro already is kicking the can down the road once again.
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