Dubs to Spend €23 Billion Of Your Coin On A 'Metro'

11th Jul 2022

The Dubs would really make you sick wouldn’t they? They’re taking €23 billion of our moola and they’re going to splurge it on a Metro. All you can do is laugh really because there’s nothing you can do about it (except vote for Corkonian independence of course).  

The big ‘selling-point’ is that there’ll be a new way of getting from Dublin city centre out to the disaster that is their chaotic airport. Experienced economists like Colm McCarthy say it’s an unnecessary vanity project.

At that price tag you’d expect some sort of high-speed rail line from Cork to Belfast where all passengers are served unlimited Tanora and Chester cake by a personal butler who’ll give you a bazzer or trim your toenails while you gleefully bypass Dublin on your way back home to the People’s Republic after a nice day out reaffirming that your city is the best one on the island.

Queues for Dublin Airport stretch back into the city centre.

Nah! All we are getting for our €23 billion is a 20km piece of track that will transport you from a glorified scrap yard with a few glass buildings in it occupied by dodgy American companies (who all know you are reading the Echo right now because you clicked an “I Accept” button on some random sneakers website six years ago which gave them legal permission to secretly listen to your breathing patterns while you sleep so they can show ads for curing snoring to whoever sleeps next to you) out to a runway surrounded by a football stadium riot. 

That’s more than 1 billion quid per kilometre, lads. Have an aul think about that there now – especially if you’re reading this while a misfortunate elderly relative who has worked hard their whole life is stuck on a trolley in A&E in the middle of July or if you’re on the housing waiting list or if you live in a city that was promised a LUAS and an event centre a couple of centuries ago and is still waiting.

And of course, we all know given the shambolic history of infrastructure projects in Dublin and the fact that building supplies are going up in price so quickly that by the time you carry a bag of cement from the back of your local DIY store to the cash register it has doubled in price, that the €23 billion won’t even pay for the construction workers’ tea and biscuits.

One thing they haven’t factored into the pants-wetting cost of a building this joke of a thing is the long drawn out public enquiry that will inevitably follow when the costs balloon out to a few trillion euro. We can all imagine the scene because we’ve had so many of them before. From Dublin’s scandalous Terminal Two debacle to the LUAS insanity, the HSE payroll system, the Children’s hospital shambles.

Any project like this in Dublin always ends with some dull, feeble civil servant goon being wheeled out to read a page of mumbo jumbo and half-arsed excuses to a panel of semi-conscious retired judges who then publish a carefully worded legal ‘Get Out of Jail’ report exonerating everyone involved and awarding legal costs to anyone who had to give evidence.

Apparently, the Metro is ‘essential public infrastructure’  – oh right, that’s the real problem with Dublin airport is it? People can’t get out to the mile long queues there fast enough, is it? After spending €23 billion the only change for passengers will be that the queues for check in and security will start at the door of the metro carriage rather than under a make-shift canopy in the airport’s car park.

You’d swear there was no other way of getting there either - all the other methods of getting to Dublin Airport aren’t good enough it seems so we have to spend billions and billions on this guaranteed failure to give consumers ‘more choice’.

Right now, there are a range of public buses, a choice of private buses and endless amounts of (deregulated) taxis that can bring you to Dublin airport. Someone can drop you off there in a car or you can drive there yourself and park up too if you want. But no, they want a nice train now too. And Cork tax payers will pay for it. Twenty-three billion euro, lads. Twenty. Three. Billion.

You couldn’t make it up. But the Dubs just did.