Investment by the Irish State in public transport infrastructure, including railway tracks, stations, vehicles and equipment, normally runs below capital spending on the road network.

In most years, road investment has cost double, at times treble, what has been spent on the railway and on trains, trams and buses for the State-owned bus companies.

Of course, the buses run on roads, so the road investment spending also facilitates public transport, including the operations of private bus companies.

Research by economists at the Department of Transport notes a pattern that holds internationally: developed countries rarely spend anything like as much on public transport, mostly consisting of capital costs for railways and trains, as they do on the road network.

The reason is that the road network is so extensive, carries most of the traffic and reaches every address in the country.

Taxes for users

Since roads are costly to build and maintain, users pay billions in taxes on fuel, purchase taxes on vehicles, annual licence fees and road tolls. The total tax-take is designed to cover roughly the costs imposed and does so in most European countries, Ireland included.

The road/rail balance is due to change in Ireland if stated Government policy is adhered to. It is enshrined in the National Development Plan that investment in public transport ought to be double the investment in roads, reflecting the Green Party’s priorities.

Unfortunately, there had been a sharp reduction in spending on the road network through the period of financial stringency following the banking collapse of late 2008 – overall State capital spending halved from 2009 to 2013, and has been slow to recover – and the roads budget fell even more.

Since roads are costly to build and maintain, users pay billions in taxes on fuel, purchase taxes on vehicles, annual licence fees and road tolls

In practical terms, the implication, even with a recovering spend on roads, is a huge expansion of investment on the railways, which would absorb most of the extra spending – buses for the State operators are a small element of overall spend on public transport.

The Government has recently published an All-Island Rail Review, prepared by the engineering consultants Ove Arup, which reflects this perspective and proposes unprecedented levels of expenditure on rail investment. There would be new and expanded capacity for both passenger and freight services, including the re-opening of lines recently closed, as well as new inter-urban capacity and new rolling stock.

The MetroLink alone, a tramline partly underground from central Dublin to the suburb of Swords on the city’s north side, would cost about €10bn, and there are to be trams for Cork and other provincial cities, as well as electrification work around the network.

No figure for total cost is given and a long time-scale is envisaged. If it happens, this would be a nationwide railway boom comparable to the great Victorian expansion in the 19th century.

Completely new intercity high-speed lines, capable of speeds up to 300km per hour, would be considered.

Private car

The Victorian rail boom in Ireland, as in Britain, was undertaken largely by private capital and ended in loss-making lines and the nationalisation of the railways.

The spoilsport was the private car, now the preferred mode of transport for almost all trips in rural Ireland. Even in Dublin, which has inherited a suburban rail system from the pre-automobile era and has revived the on-street tram, cars dominate the public’s travel preferences.

The bus network in Dublin carries more than twice the number of public transport patrons who use the Dart or Luas, according to the National Travel Survey for 2022.

The emphasis on rail in Ireland is surprising. Outside the Dublin area, the network is quite limited in coverage and older lines were closed for a reason. Many have found a new role as greenways, popular with walkers and cyclists, including tourists.

Since much of the road traffic is scheduled for transition to electric vehicles and electricity for decarbonisation, the climate change motive for rail investment has been weakened.

Transport minister Eamon Ryan and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar have been talking up the prospects for rail freight, which they feel can increase its share from under 1% to as much as 10%.

On the most recent available figures, Irish Rail’s annual turnover from rail freight is around €4m, roughly the business of a single successful pub or hotel. This figure included the only volume customer, Tara Mines, where production has since been suspended.

The rail freight business has been in terminal decline for decades and for obvious reasons – containerised port traffic travelling short distances is not a runner, and internal freight trips rarely involve journeys by truck longer than 100km.

There was a costly attempt to expand rail freight in the 1990s with expensive gantries installed at various locations, and it ended in failure. Small islands without coal or similar trades are not promising markets for rail freight.