IN her recent criticism of the proposed Luas light rail system the leader of the Progressive Democrats quoted figures from a report which had been rejected, it has emerged.
Mr Lowry's Department yesterday issued a statement which said the document to which Ms Mary Harney referred was a working document examining two route options and that she had quoted from the rejected option.
A spokeswoman for her party Ms Harney had based her on a February 1995 report entitled Alternatives to Tallaght: a Multi Criteria Analysis, commissioned by the Luas project team from its firm of design consultants, Semaly. This confirmed by Mr Eamonn Brady, spokesman for the light rail project team.
According to Mr Brady, the report covered two possible routes from Tallaght into Dublin, one through the Dodder Valley and the other through Inchicore.
The Dodder Valley option, to which Ms Harney referred and which would only have reduced city centre traffic by less than 2 per cent, has since been rejected in favour of the Inchicore route.
This would relieve the area of greatest congestion along the Grand Canal route, he said, and would stop traffic from entering the city centre.
He estimated that this option would take 2,000 to 2,200 cars off the road at peak time.
Ms Harney said earlier this week that she had seen a report which proved that Luas would do "little or nothing to solve Dublin's transport problems" and that the Tallaght LRT line would reduce cross city traffic during the morning rush hour by only 192 cars, or less than 2 per cent. She said it was a "miserable return" on an investment of £220 million.
Mr Lowry described these claims as "seriously flawed" and "wildly inaccurate".
"Mary Harney clearly does not know what she is talking about or else she is deliberately distorting and ignoring the facts," he told RTE radio's News At One.
"I simply don't know what report she was quoting from but clearly she was not able to read the figures properly."
Mr Lowry had said that the Luas system would lead to a reduction of up to 20 per cent in traffic using the canal bridges and that 15 million passengers would avail of the service annually.
Ms Harney responded by accusing the Minister of being "out of touch" and again asked him to clarify whether or not Luas would reduce peak hour traffic by only 192 cars.
The Luas team will publish its traffic management report next Monday. Mr Brady said the report would answer many of the queries about the proposed system's effect on traffic and would "look at how traffic and the LRT will co exist successfully side by side".