Sir, - The Labour Party has no need of hymn-sheets nor secondhand American PR jargon to explain its position on transport problems in Dublin. Unlike Liz O'Donnell (June 1st) and her PD/ FF cohorts, we want actual trams, on actual rails, in actual streets, in Dublin. This would have been underway this year except for the misguided and disastrous intervention in the LUAS project by Minister O'Rourke. I don't know what Liz O'Donnell was doing at the cabinet table as she and the rest of her shambles of a government were chewing over Mrs O'Rourke's waste of time and taxpayers' money called the Atkins Report, but it certainly was not planning a light rail "network" for Dublin.
Ms O'Donnell calls her government's alleged plan "imaginative"; imaginary would be a better word. As she has emphatically "assured" your readers "that construction of the Sandyford/City Centre and Tallaght/City Centre links will proceed without delay", could she tell us where are the Light Rail or Tramway Orders authorising such construction, and when will they be presented to the Dail?
Could she also tell us how vehicles would be placed on a Sandyford/City Centre line above street level and not connected to anything else? Will there be a maintenance depot on this line, and where will it be located? If not, where will the vehicles be stored at night and where will they be repaired if they break down?
Now, these modest little questions might be quite irritating to an elevated ministerial personage like Ms O'Donnell, but the answers to them are obviously essential to anyone wanting to operate an actual tramway system in Dublin.
With your permission, sir, I would like to challenge Ms O'Donnell to provide these answers without delay and, for the edification of your readers and her benighted constituents, put her money where her hymn-sheet is. - Yours, etc., Seamas Ratigan,
Chairman,
Labour Tallaght East,
Oldbawn,
Dublin 24.