The DART Underground decision

An Bord Pleanála has decided, unanimously, to grant the DART Underground Railway Order

To read the full DART Underground decision, please click here.

Having read the details of the decision, my commiserations go to the residents of East Wall for whom little or no change appears to have been made to the Railway Order such that its impact on that community would be reduced.

There is a concern in the East Wall community that the Strategic Infrastructure Act 2006 has facilitated a situation whereby the concerns of objectors and observers were given a hearing and then dismissed in favour of the project's proposers - in the name of the 'common good'.

An almost identical decision would, it seems, have been made in the event no Third Party involvement had ever taken place.

I wonder whether if each part of the project had been assessed separately under the normal planning application procedure, would the project have eventually been passed in such an unaltered state. I doubt it.

This is no doubt a complicated project. It is no doubt an important project for the state. But the impacts of the project fall almost entirely on one community. If this is in the common good, then it fails to pass most definitions of the common good.

The common good is served when it is possible to make everyone better off without making anyone worse off. Within East Wall, if this project ever starts, life will be worse off for over ten years.

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