When a taxi driver told Irish Times economics correspondent Eoin Burke-Kennedy that there was a ghost train station under Terminal 1 in Dublin Airport he was intrigued.
The architects who designed the terminal in the late 1960s were smart enough to future-proof it – to incorporate into their plan a vast underground train station because, surely it wouldn’t be long before a metro would connect the airport with the city centre.
Their thinking was right – but they didn’t reckon with Ireland’s sluggish planning system and an endemic failure to plan for and then build key infrastructure projects.
This was long before the stop-start Metro North/MetroLink project came along, which is already 20 years in the planning without a track being laid. And even if the metro ever happens, the proposed airport stop is not under Terminal 1.
As Burke-Kennedy tells In the News, Area 14 is a metaphor for so much that is wrong with Ireland’s approach to key infrastructure projects, from housing to energy supply, transport to health.
Planning for a bigger population is something most states, but Ireland particularly, seem to fall down on.
Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Aideen Finnegan.
