McCarthy hopes to stamp his authority on Dublin transport

For city commuters who despair of ever having a modern, efficient public transport system, Conor McCarthy, chairman of the Dublin Transportation Office (DTO) presents an image of greater Dublin for the next century which is unrecognisable.

The office's blueprint submission to Government to the period 2000-2006 envisages a 28 per cent increase in the bus fleet's capacity and the introduction of real time information, 40 per cent additional capacity on the DART system and the implementation of LUAS, an improved roads network, and increases in the number of bus and cycle lanes. Mr McCarthy points to the improved bus routes from Malahide and Lucan as the forerunner of what is to follow. Bus journey times have been reduced by 20 minutes in each case. "The bus from Lucan is now 50 per cent quicker than by car at peak times."

The favoured vehicle now is no longer the double decker but a wide-bodied single deck articulated bus.

The recommendations have been made amid a scenario where there are 1,000 extra cars a week arriving on the streets of Dublin.

"Last year it was 600, it is now up to 1,000. How long that will last, I do not know. The roads are finite so you have a problem."

For the motorist, the benefits of the new Dublin will be dubious. The blueprint's objective, as it politely puts it, is "to give the car its rightful place in the transport system but not allow it to dominate". Before motorists see red at losing their place in the sun, they should know that Mr McCarthy commutes in his Jaguar car and started his career with Dunlop before moving into car rentals. He espouses a philosophical approach to being stuck in traffic.

"What people have to recognise is if they do that, they are the problem."

And does he have any sympathy for clamped motorists? "None, none, none for them," he says. "And if I were clamped myself or towed away, I would say, `fair enough'."

He is no transport fanatic and does not even know what he would find if he looked under the bonnet of his car. The spur to the many career changes he has undergone is change itself. "I like change. I actually live well with change and the challenge of change."

His present role is "a tremendous challenge". I find it fascinating. I readily admit that we are strategic and therefore a lot of the things we do, maybe people in 20 years time will say we did the right thing."

The role is a perfect fit for him. By nature he is a long-term strategist. "Everybody wants immediate simple solutions and you cannot provide them, but that does not mean the strategy is not right." He was once described by a cynical stockbroker as personifying the triumph of optimism over experience.

But, referring to his past role as chief executive and chairman of Ryan Hotels, Mr McCarthy says: "I think if you are in the tourist business, you have to be optimistic." "Obviously one made mistakes. But I do not believe any business decision is, in an absolute sense, right or wrong.

"I rarely look back. As far as I am concerned, you cannot really change anything that happened up to now, apart from learning from it."

He is currently seeing out his role as joint chairman of Irish Life & Permanent having helped steer Irish Life to flotation in 1991 and to the merger with Irish Permanent last December, a "massive change", he says.

The road to chairing the DTO has been a long one. Although associated most with the Ryan Hotel group, Mr McCarthy started working for Dunlop, the tyre manufacturing company after leaving school at St Mary's, Rathmines, in the early 1950s. He has never mapped out a route for himself, saying that when he was 18 he just wanted a job. He moved over to Murrays, the car hire business shortly afterwards and then almost immediately went to work for Dermot Ryan who had a rival car hire fleet, Ryan Tourist Holdings. In 1960, at the age of 28, Mr McCarthy became managing director of the company, now Swan Ryan. He subsequently steered it into hotels, partly because of the difficulty he had finding beds for clients of the car hire fleet.

In 1973, he left Ryan to set up Pembroke Investments, an investment holding company which was involved in the takeover of Bolands Mills in 1976. That same year, he found himself back in Swan Ryan as executive chairman and, a year later, was involved in the purchase of the Gresham Hotel for £1.6 million, 60 per cent more than what had been paid for it two years previously. He views that acquisition and the purchase of Dun Laoghaire's Royal Marine Hotel as successes in the long term. "I think there was considerable vision when I bought the Gresham Hotel and the Royal Marine, and the ones in Brussels and Amsterdam."

The son of a civil servant and originally from Rathmines, he remembers the myriad numbers of cyclists who commuted to work in the 1950s and 1960s, in their own way a menace to cars at the time. "One hundred thousand people went by bicycle to work in 1961. That is a figure I got in here.

"If you were driving a car in O'Connell Street, your biggest problem was the cyclists were spread all across the road."

There will be no return to those halcyon days. "I do not believe we will ever get to the stage where we do not have congestion," he says.

Mr McCarthy is also a past president of the Irish Hotels Federation and a former chairman of Coras Trachtala, the Irish Trade Board. Now he regards greater Dublin's 1.25 million people as his customers. "I have always started with what does the customer want and I believe today, it is more important than ever. The customer is the key." He believes traffic congestion is a serious threat to the State's economic growth, "the one thing that can grind the whole thing to a halt". Now he is cast in the role of persuader and co-ordinator rather than enforcer, having no executive power. At least in principle, he finds widespread agreement with the office's objectives - from the likes of Dublin Chamber of Commerce, the Irish Business & Employers Confederation (IBEC) and the Automobile Association (AA).

"The problem, I suppose, is as in most things in life, the bits that impinge on individual sectors and require sacrifice and change in those sectors are the bits they do not want."

IBEC has not made recommendations to members on being public transport friendly. "IBEC produced a report recently but there is not even a mention about what they are going to do to encourage their members to give staff multiple bus passes."

Ticketing on buses is another issue that needs to be tackled urgently. Mr McCarthy believes it should be possible to travel from Bray to Dublin Airport on the one ticket and using different modes of transport.

"Ticketing has not kept pace with the other improvements."