Questions and Answers
 

Questions and Answers on Monday 23rd of October, will be discussing the Metro North project. Minister for Transport, Mr. Martin Cullen will be on the panel.

A representative from Platform 11 has been invited to ask a question from the audience.

I missed this, what was the question and how did it go?

Cullen appeared to provide an open goal which no-one shot at: his apparent assertion that commuter rail services from Tuam existed.

Thanks for that Mark.
Oh God, Dublin bashing again!

Its really sad to see the utter ignorance of people

Metro has a solid cost benefit number, it was published
Everyone in the transport business has a good idea of the cost
Shannon has no hope for a rail link
And Matt Cooper was damn right about the best things taking way too long, give the man a award for roasting Cullen for well over a minute

And the sooner someone gets rid of Olivia Mitchell the better for all of us, she has done nothing but react to what has happened and those of us in the business have zero if not negative confidence in her in any role to do with transport since she clearly has no clue and more to the point its not just her clearly who ever is advising FG is not doing a good job then again WRC seems to be top dog which explains a lot

Olivia Mitchell was pathetic - Cullen played her off the park. Well done to you, Derek, you clobbered all politicians with your imput, it was well thought out.

Martin Cullen actually seemed reasonably competent!

After the e-voting fiasco, I was dreading what would happen when he was appointed Minister for Transport, but all in all, have been pleasently suprised :)

I just HOPE to god Olivia Mitchell doesn't end up as minister after the election :eek:

Mary O'Rourke - Terrible (Set transport back about 5 years)
Seamus Brennan - No balls
Martin Cullen - Im coming around to him. He is well advised and seems hell bent on not making the same mistakes that his predecessors made.

Plus he produced Transport 21 which was the first time any of the transport authorities got a go-ahead for their own project financially while knowing what the other was planning.

Thread started about political parties and their performance on transport issues here (members section, so if you don't have access, join now!)

I'll never forgive him for July 10th 15:12 Cork that desert looked good

Problem is the guy acts like a muppet and tries to cash in on every opportunity. What we want is action as Derek so well put last night we have been sitting on this long enough we should be pushing for things to be done

End of the day its a simple problem, IE and RPA submit the plan, DoT Ok's and IE and the RPA get the cheque and they start work in what ever order they feel as the experts to deliver instead of the current mess where despite being ahead on paper the interconnector has been held up while the metro which is clearly a bigger vote winner goes first

Evidence would suggest that Cullen has himself directly delayed a number of projects by around a month

The only good thing anyone could say about Cullen is that he is not quite as bad as his predecessors.

O'rourke was apalling, even by the rotten standards of politics in this country.

Brennan was just a media whore who blurted out wave after wave of inflammatory rubbish that managed to get on the bad side of just about everyone as well as single-handedly causing industrial action in CIE with his substance-free rhetoric.

Cullen is an incompetent crony who blunders around chasing the cameras for any opportunity to look good. In any other country he would have been hounded out by the media for his previous crimes against the public purse and his constant stream of self-serving half-truths. He is just about capable of making an apparently coherent sentence or two which immediately makes him appear smarter than the typical Dail Eireann inmate.

Problem is that the opposition is little better.
Mitchell's only input is to blindly criticise the current lot on whatever issue seems to be the most populist at the time, often showing her ignorance of the basic facts in the process.

Roisin Shortall has appeared to know roughly what she is talking about the odd time that I have read/seen her input, but those are very rare appearances so it is hard to judge.

Good comments Derek, you came across very well...... However I was surprised the interconnector was not mentioned.
(Of course I can only imagine how little time there was..... Derek should be a member of the Panel the next time there is a Transport based show)