By Steve Bradley
THE removal of afternoon flights on the new PSO (Public Service Obligation) contract for the Donegal-Dublin air route has triggered anger here, particularly amongst those who rely on it for medical care. Whilst this backlash is understandable and completely justified, it overlooks a more fundamental problem which the very existence of these flights serves to highlight.
Letterkenny is by-far Donegal’s largest population centre, and one of the island’s fastest-growing towns. It sits 228kms140miles north-west of Dublin Airport. Carrickfin Airport is an important facility for West Donegal, and sits 275km170 miles from Dublin Airport. In any well-functioning, affluent, developed nation, journeys of those distances would be catered for by decent surface-transport options (road and rail).
But because Donegal’s infrastructure has been wound-down and left neglected over the last 60 years, it makes sense here to put people onto small aeroplanes at a high cost-per-passenger and fly them on what are relatively short journeys instead. As if we were trying to traverse the High Himalayas or wide Arctic tundra, rather than a small island. And all because nothing has been done since the Victorian era to create sensible alternative transport options here.
The very existence of PSO-funded flights between Donegal and Dublin is therefore a symbol of failure. A failure to take the needs of this county and its people seriously. A failure to provide even the basic level of infrastructure that similar counties like Mayo and Kerry have long taken for granted. And a failure to tackle the economic, social and physical isolation that Donegal has suffered from partition.
Little or nothing is being done to genuinely tackle these core issues. Instead a sticking-plaster ‘solution’ of internal flights on small planes provides a low-budget way to continue ignoring the root problem for decades more to come.
Valentine’s day on Saturday marked the 61st anniversary of the day that Donegal and Tyrone lost the last of their railways. Of Ireland’s four North-West counties (Donegal, Derry, Tyrone & Fermanagh), three have been cut-off completely from the Irish rail network for over six decades. Nor do they have even a mile of motorway either – despite a combined population of almost 700,000 people.
Letterkenny is currently the third-largest town in the Republic without rail, and will ascend to first place in 2035 when trains are extended to Swords and Navan. We can’t continue relying on small aeroplanes as the best way to connect Donegal with Dublin. A more sensible longer-term solution is to accelerate the proposed reinstatement of a 200kmhr rail link between Letterkenny, Derry and Portadown – enabling journeys to the heart of Dublin in approx 3 hours.
PSO flights would obviously have to remain in the meantime – but should be acknowledged merely as a short-term fix whilst the real work of better connecting Donegal took place. But we cannot allow the Dublin flights to distract us from the more fundamental infrastructure problem of which they are merely a symptom, not a solution.
Steve Bradley is Chair of ‘Into The West’ Rail Campaign. They are holding a public meeting about bringing rail back to Donegal on Wednesday, February 18 at 7pm in the Station House Hotel, Letterkenny. All are welcome.
