Wicklow Sinn Féin TD John Brady has criticised the All-Island Strategic Rail Review as offering little encouragement to Wicklow commuters. He described the report as both lacking the vision and courage required to address the public transport needs of the county of Wicklow. The review had looked at the potential of tunnelling through Bray Head, developing a new rail line along the M11 corridor, and building a new line for the DART along the N11 corridor. But these were all dismissed as options.
Brady said:
“Despite the fact that the government are lauding their intent to spend up to €37 billion by 2050 to improve rail services across the Island, the solutions required to put in place a first-class rail service in Wicklow are in the words of the report ‘unlikely to be justifiable’.
I find this assertion difficult to accept. Rail services in Wicklow are already grossly oversubscribed, with commuters lucky to get standing room, never mind a seat during rush hour.
Congestion on our roads, which the Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan refuses to upgrade for ideological reasons, is already at gridlock level during peak driving times.
Yet nothing is being done to persuade drivers to get out of their cars and use public transport in the county.
Wicklow is a fantastic county, which has undergone and continues to experience significant population growth. There are some parts of the county which have already reached saturation point.
And while I welcome the expansion of the DART to Wicklow Town, something that I have been pushing for, for a long time, there is a need here for a better developed service, running more frequently along twin tracks.
The failure to take this opportunity to put in place a plan to expand the rail service in the county is inexplicable.
This was the opportunity to future proof the rail service in the county. It will currently require an investment of hundreds of millions of euros to protect the existing rail line from the impact of coastal erosion.
After which it will remain a single-track rail line, with limited scope for the type of expansion required to meet the needs of Wicklow.
In 2017 Iarnród Éireann carried out a study to assess the anticipated increase in maintenance requirements for this area resulting from climate change. This study identified several key areas between Dublin and Wicklow where strategic intervention would be required in order to allow existing rail services to continue to operate with minimal disruption.
The East Coast Railway Infrastructure Protection Projects (ECRIPP) was established to deliver the necessary enhanced coastal protection to the existing railway infrastructure in a number of key locations on this rail network. In 2022 Iarnród Éireann announced it required 230 million euros to protect the Dublin-Rosslare line from the effects of climate change.
Climate change has resulted in climate-related issues, such as waves washing over the rail tracks, have increased in recent years. The severity of climate events has also increased in the past 20 years, where there have been more individual cases of climate and weather problems than in the past 100 years.
This will leave a requirement for more and more maintenance works to be carried out to respond to the effects of coastal erosion, wave overtopping and coastal flooding on the rail line and supporting infrastructure. These works result in increasing disruption to existing services and may render the line unviable in this area in the future.
Coupled with this the fact that the current line is a single-track will limit opportunities to increase service frequencies. Rail alignments are poor, limiting opportunities to increase speeds.
There was an opportunity to relocate the rail line inland, running alongside the N11/M11 where a twin rail line could have been built to maximise the efficiency of the rail service in the county for the benefit of both commuters and business freight.
Yet again the coalition government has shown that it lacks the commitment to invest in Wicklow’s future. The price for this lack of vision, foresight, and courage will unfortunately have to be continued to be paid by the people of Wicklow.