With the Luas in the news again and Mary O'Rourke looking at the possibility of putting it underground, Donal Mangan, CIE's project manager for the light rail system planned for Dublin, may have to revise his recent utterance that the past year had been an "annus horribilis". The £220 million scheme came under attack from so many quarters - including former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, who was observed one dawn measuring the road at the corner of Nassau Street and Dawson Street - and it looks like getting worse.
But Mangan has yet to run into the particular problem which faced the planners of Manchester's Metrolink light rail system, when it transpired that one of the four pubs they were about to demolish was a well-known haunt of Friederich Engels, while he and Karl Marx were writing the Communist Manifesto.
There was a huge hue and cry, with the Engels Society pleading for its preservation. That is until a Metrolink researcher discovered that Engels, who was fond of a drop, drank in virtually every pub in Manchester.
The building was pulled down.