Sir, - Your Motoring Correspondent, Andrew Hamilton, provided an in-depth analysis of the new car market (The Irish Times, July 14th) and asked: "When is the boom in new car sales going to lose its momentum?" The answer presumably is "when car ownership in Ireland reaches the European average", but the question is too important for policy, planning and national infrastructure to be left to conjecture. Government policy needs to focus both on bringing car ownership up to the European average and on providing the infrastructure to match.
Ireland has consistently lagged behind in the statistics for car ownership in the EU. In 1993, we were 14th with 222 per 1,000 persons with the European average at 410 and only Greece behind us. In 1996, we were 14th with 263 with the EU average up to 423. When the 1999 figures are published, Ireland will probably be in the 290s with the average moving towards 500.
Recent visits to countries with lower per capita GDP than ours show the infrastructure moving ahead. Spain and Portugal have built motorways throughout the country and completed the capital's underground railways. Greece, too, has built the underground railway for Athens and is cranking up its economy for early entry into the euro. Ireland must be in danger of sinking to last place on this fundamental measure of social well-being, even if the boom in new car sales does not lose its momentum.
Happily, the infrastructure needed in Ireland over the last few decades and essential today is well known and within the tax figure of £2.4 billion per year in the period 2000-2010. That infrastructure includes:
A underground railway system for Dublin - the normal means of public transport in most European capitals.
Three Dublin traffic tunnels: One from Donnybrook Church to Whitehall Church, one from Whitehall Church under the sand to Dun Laoghaire and one from Tallaght to the Port. Nearly all major European cities, including Cork and Liverpool, have traffic tunnels. You cannot push public transport along the narrow Georgian and Victorian streets of Dublin unless you want to produce gridlock.
A national road system: The N1 to N11 roads need to be motorways or dual-carriageways all the way. Ireland is the only country in the EU in which motorists on national roads are forced to risk head-on collisions and cope with traffic going in two directions. It is now time to build the full roads - not just bypasses, however essential they may be. - Yours, etc.,
Dr D. Keegan, Dalkey, Co Dublin.