Varadkar does not present an impression that public transport is very much to do with his brief. All of the recent transport announcements were road-based aside from a few miles of tram-line to Broombridge and this is at a time when we have recently spent billions of euro building more than enough motorways for the country. Spatially, this country is completely banjaxed and they need to stop adding infrastructure that makes this worse and start trying to fix the mess that was made over the last 15 years.
I do think that at this point, adding tram lines makes the most sense as they help city centres gain critical mass. They are the cheapest by far which means that any money found under the mattress would make the most difference. They certainly makes a lot more sense than investing in more white-elephant motorways.
Electrification makes little sense until the rolling stock gets a lot older or if the DART underground was to be built. If the Maynooth line was electrified, Irish Rail would suddenly have a heap of relatively new 29Ks on their hands that would just be left to rot with 20 to 30 years expected service life remaining. It isn't likely that they would use the opportunity to increase frequency, so all that would happen is that several hundred million euro would be spent and no passenger benefit would result.
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