IRELAND: Outgoing Transport Minister Eamon Ryan wished the team launching Young Rail Professionals Ireland well via video link at a celebration in Dublin on November 7.
Ryan said he believed YRP Ireland would have the same influence in the country that the eponymous networking association had had in Britain since its launch in 2009.
Other keynote speakers at the event included Arup’s Peter Adams, one of the authors of the recent All-Island Strategic Rail Review, and Piers Wood, Country Managing Director for Alstom, who offered an update on the DART+ rolling stock renewal programme.
Both speakers praised the role played by the minister — who will not contest the country’s general election on November 29 — for boosting the pipeline of rail investment in Ireland and setting a political agenda that would be supportive of rail into the future.
‘We wanted to make a splash’, Adams said of the Review process. He felt the resulting 30 recommendations offered ‘an opportunity to shape rail in Ireland for a generation’, and that the review team had had genuine political backing. ‘It was one of the diamonds of my career in terms of a project to work on’, he said.
For Alstom, Wood said that skills shortages and high housing costs in Irish cities remained a serious constraint on the local rail supply chain, acknowledging that today there is little scope for local content in the new DART+ trainsets now being delivered to the Dublin suburban network.
Welcoming YRP’s launch, Wood said ‘we need more people in more roles in rail in Ireland — it’s not just engineers either, we need HR people, contract managers, everyone’.
Day-to-day running of YRP Ireland will be in the hands of Committee Chair Matthew Murnane, who told the audience that when he was an engineering student in Dublin, ‘I don’t recall anyone mentioning that I could have a career in rail, and if students like me didn’t know, how would others find out?’
An initial programme of events is now being developed, and YRP’s Young Rail Tours initiative hopes to arrange a visit to the Irish rail network next year.
YRP’s Head of Ireland James Shanley hoped a ‘structure is in place now whereby we can mirror all the good things YRP has done in Britain’, while YRP Chief Executive Bonnie Price urged companies to support YRP Ireland through the organisation’s corporate membership scheme. She highlighted research commissioned by YRP showing that every £1 invested in the organisation’s activities by corporate members generates more than £4 in socio-economic benefits.
