Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is Constructive Voices.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Constructive Voices, the podcast for the construction people, with news, views and expert interviews.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: This is Jackie Deberka for Constructive Voices and I'm delighted to introduce the third in our series for Youth Month. It's November 2025, the first ever, and Keira O' Brien is doing an amazing job in all these interviews. Today's interview is with public transport advocate and Dublin City Councillor Feljan Jose, who joins Kira and unpacks how streets, housing and rail policy shape daily life and climate action. We connect the DART Metrolink and better buses to the built environment, denser homes near stations, safer walking and cycling, revived main streets and public spaces that welcome everyone. Feldon also reflects on Irish climate advocacy, what's working, what isn't, and how these lessons scale into global city solutions. Over to you, Kieran Felchan. This is Constructive Voices.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: Thank you for joining us today. Felchen, can we start with you telling me a bit about yourself and how you came to be so involved in public transport advocacy?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: So my name is Feljan Jose. I'm currently a counsellor for the Green Party. I got involved in public transport and just kind of more sustainability in general, mostly through a group called Dublin Commuter Coalition, which was set up in 2018, 2019, in response to a lot of negative pushback against projects like Metrolink and Boss Connects, which were being proposed at the time. We had a lot of projects that were coming down the line and there was a lot of negative pushback against it, but there was no one really advocating for it. So a group of us came together and we kind of filled that void there. But I was always interested in that. I was always kind of, even as a child, a trained child, if you want to call it that. So, yeah, I was always really interested. But like I said, there was nothing going on in Dublin to get involved in. So when things started happening in 2018, 2019, I got involved and here I am.
[00:01:59] Speaker C: Amazing. And then you talked a bit about nearly joining because of the opposition to kind of counteract that. So is that the same opposition now that you face five, six, seven years on, or does it look different today?
[00:02:13] Speaker B: It's definitely different today. I think, like, public opinion has changed a lot. I think most people are in favor of large investment in public transport and active travel, a lot more public representatives just actively calling for more investment in public transport. And that's great, you know.
[00:02:30] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really good. I see it myself as a student with the half price fares. It's so good.
Do you have any information Any updates on the DART program?
[00:02:40] Speaker B: So DART plus is this program to upgrade and extend the existing rail network around Dublin. It's at capacity, but there's room for more if you actually upgrade it and electrify it and remove all the level crossings that are slowing it down. And the plan is to more than double the number of trains going through there every hour whenever they get funding, hopefully in a couple of months. The Irish Rail says that they are ready to begin the enabling works next year. That'll be transformative for a lot of kind of housing developments along that line. You'll see if you kind of follow that line. There's a lot of high density housing that's happening with the hope and expectation that this project will happen as well.
It's promised. So a lot of housing is happening around that line, getting that built and doubling the capacity of that line. It will be transformative for all the people living out there.
[00:03:35] Speaker C: Yeah, it does improve the quality of living. But like you say and how you described, the timeline for these things is so long.
And I was thinking about the Metrolink thing with your cake. I thought it was so funny.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: So the Metrolink as it exists now is a planned metro line from just south of Stevens Green going north to the airport and beyond to Swords. It came out of several different plans from the 70s, 80s and 2000s to build and upgrade rail lines in Dublin. Eventually they did get permission to build the Metro north, as it was called, very similar version of it in 2011. And that was during the crash and nothing actually happened. The whole thing was shelved. It was a huge mistake to shelve it, I think. But what we've ended up with, to be fair, is a much better design, I think. But, you know, the work on the redesign started in 2017, 2018, the planning application went in in 2022. It's been three years now, almost. The cake was me going out to the offices of Van Broflonol where they've had the document, the Planning application for 1000 days, coming up to 1050 now to celebrate the anniversary. But it has been glacial. But to think this was all done to save costs and now we've ended up with a much longer timeline, but also triple, at least triple the budget of what it was supposed to cost in 2011.
[00:05:00] Speaker C: Yeah, it's very interesting. I thought the cake was, though, a very unique way of pointing out the absurdity of the.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: All you can do is laugh, really. It is.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: And it's a good way to get attention because I remember looking at it on Instagram being like why the hell are they celebrating a birthday at the planning mission? But no, very interesting though. But I guess then it seemed to me like that was in conjunction with the wider Green Party.
Could you tell us a bit more about your involvement with the Irish Green Party?
[00:05:32] Speaker B: So I joined in 2020 after we went into government.
2020 was not a great time to get involved in anything really.
[00:05:39] Speaker C: Like what's the highlight of your, of your time with the Green Party?
[00:05:42] Speaker B: The cake, really.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: Honestly I see that, that makes sense to me.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: There's been loads of things, there's been loads of things like. So when we like election happened in June and then straight into the end of June, July, there was the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan which was a plan that was approved to improve public transport priority in the city centre, pedestrianize some streets and reduce the car dominated nature of the city center.
Like we organized protests. Like there was a protest outside a city hall council meeting of 200 odd people showed up to you know, call for less car dominated streets and better public spaces and better public transport. And there was no, there was very little opposition within the council. Most councillors were very for it.
So like it was very strange to have like to be elected and then immediately trying to like organize a campaign around just trying to get that through. And it happened in August. So that was like a very busy two months and a baptism fire in a lot of ways.
[00:06:46] Speaker C: Yeah, really interesting. I want to broaden out the discussion a little bit because I understand that you're, you're a councillor in Dublin. But I think a lot of people in Dublin, in the rest of Ireland abroad are more concerned with rural public transport that it's, it's kind of falling behind our urban progress. I'm wondering if you have any ideas on how this can be done given the built environment of rural Ireland.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: There's been a lot of work done on this. So Local Link is the kind of rural bus service that we have and the idea is kind of small mini buses or large buses going through small villages and connecting them to local towns and all of that. 2019, the annual kind of ridership was around 8,900,000. By 2024 that has come up to about 3,4 million.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: For that to happen in a four year period with COVID like that's transformative. Yeah. Drastically improving the frequency. That's what led to four or five fold increase in usage in passenger numbers over that, over that period helped people in rural areas but it also made rural areas more accessible to everyone else. Like, like there's been huge improvements in Wicklow, for example, which does connect all the towns within rural Wicklow. But it also makes it easier for me to go hiking in Wicklow on a bus, which you couldn't really do, like you needed a car.
[00:08:05] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really, it's really nice. The making nature accessible thing is something that we don't often highlight. We tend to focus on the getting people to work, but it is just as important, 100%. Yeah. So I wonder, this is clearly a success story, I guess, talking from a policy perspective, from a global perspective, do you think there's any learnings from this project that could be applied in other countries, in other jurisdictions?
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Build it and they'll use it?
[00:08:32] Speaker C: You know, we've talked then a bit about people in Dublin using transport, people in rural areas using transport. I came across an idea.
God, I was gonna say recently. No, it's about a year ago now, but this idea that women find public transport less accessible, and I didn't get it right, but they explained it to me that men more often go from home to work, from work to home, and women more often go, say, from home, to drop the kids off at school, to pick up some groceries, to drop it into a friend, to head to work. That kind of idea of trip chaining, they call it trip chaining. Yeah, yeah. And I recognize then that, you know, we have our leap card that you click on for one or two euro and that covers you for 90 minutes. That does help with that trip chaining. But do you have any other, any other ideas or any projects in the work that you think would assist people who travel in this way?
[00:09:30] Speaker B: Well, it's what you were saying earlier. You know, we only think, generally try to think of these journeys, is going from work to home and that's it. Or people kind of think of very, very specific use cases. For example, Metrolink. People almost entirely associate that with going to the airport. Whereas it's much bigger than that. Much bigger. We only talk about going to work and back. We don't talk about going to your friend's house or going to the beach or going to the creche or. Yeah, going to the creche and then doing the shopping and then to work and then back home and doing that little circuitous route that some people, especially women do make.
So there's been some work done to make that more accessible. And like you said, the 90 minute fare, which means that you're not penalized for, you know, having to take multiple bosses or making a journey that is not point to point. That makes it cheaper, but it also has to be convenient. It's not just about cheap or cost, it has to be convenient as well. So that's where things like the new orbital bus routes that were introduced in Dublin.
So the idea that these communities that were never connected before seems ridiculous now. You know, having that three layers of orbital routes that don't go into the city center but just connect the communities along the suburbs. Trying to. Yeah, trying to accommodate for that, trying to get people on public transport for those journeys that are not the conventional 9 to 5 suburb to city center and back out has been. Has been very popular. I think all those orbital routes are incredibly popular.
[00:10:57] Speaker C: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It really does. Alright, so we've been talking about the new ways that we've been looking at public transport, whether that be going to enjoy nature or taking non traditional 9 to 5 routes. Is there any kind of new approaches or new projects or plans that you're hoping for or campaigning for? For Budget 2026?
[00:11:18] Speaker B: For Budget 2026. For me it's all about getting funding to start construction. The last four or five years has been about planning applications and consultations, crossing all the T's and dotting all the eyes and making everything shovel ready. So like I said, DART plus West is ready to go to construction next year. DART plus Southwest is ready to go to construction next year. Last national development plan committed to funding Metrolink and DART plus and all of that. So the next four, five, six years are going to be transformative for Dublin. It's to be a lot of disruption, but it's going to be transformative with a lot of projects that are under construction and transforming the city. Worst thing you can do is like Metro north shelve it or put it on Longfinger to try and redesign it or anything like that, which is just going to make it more expensive and you have to stop doing that.
[00:12:08] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think like from what, from what I've heard and from the politics I've engaged in, most of the projects that you mention are very politically popular. The only thing I've heard kind of critique about really is, is Metrolink and people saying that Dublin doesn't have the geography for Metrolink, that it doesn't have the environment for it. What do you say to these critics? What do you think of this criticism?
[00:12:32] Speaker B: I think there's a mountain of studies and reports that show that Metrolink is needed and it'll have a very positive impact on that corridor from city centre through North Dublin to the airport and out to Fingal.
You know that it has a great cost to benefit ratio. And also there's a lot of land along that line, along that corridor that are on, that's undeveloped and is suited for housing. And we need investment, we need infrastructure investment to unlock that land. There is a huge infrastructure deficit because we focused on basically just housing on its own for decades without talking about the infrastructure that that is needed to go alongside it. And if you don't deliver the infrastructure at the same time, then you end up with these car dependent communities and then when you do deliver the infrastructure, then it's too difficult to get people out of their cars. Like housing policy is transport policy. If you don't deliver these good high quality transport infrastructure alongside these housing, then you have huge problems down the line of traffic congestion, car dependency, health issues, pollution issues. Even with electric cars, you still have pollution issues from, you know, tires and brakes and all this kind of dust. We have to invest in public transport now to get to kind of deliver the housing that we need along these, along these huge empty tracts of land, but also deliver them in a sustainable manner so that people are buying into areas that has access to good public transport infrastructure.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that that really appeals to the broader political messaging that Ireland is focusing on right now with the housing crisis. And connecting those things is very important politically, morally, sustainably. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. Thank you for that. In the built environment of Dublin and what we have to work with, we do have a lot of vacant buildings, a lot of derelict buildings and we see loads of new attempts at different types of policy and how that can be addressed. And it's all very complicated, it's all very, very overwhelming, I find, with the amount of different solutions, different councils having different solutions, different national approaches. Do you have a weigh in on that topic?
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Yeah, so I try to do a lot of work around vacancy and dereliction, like we're talking about transport, but also when you're investing in these multi billion euro projects in kind of especially inner city areas, it doesn't make sense to have huge amounts of vacant buildings there or derelict buildings there, or vacant sites. You know, we have to regenerate them, we have to breathe life back into those communities and we have to have people living there to be able to justify all this investment as well.
[00:15:11] Speaker C: Yeah. And I wonder then if we have increased transport through an area with derelict or vacant buildings, is that enough, is increased public transport enough to increase the value of the land and make people do something with it? Or do we need other things to supplement that?
[00:15:27] Speaker B: You need the stick as well. The carrot is one thing, but you need the stick.
So that's things like derelict sites, levies, vacant sites, levies and things like that. So a huge issue that we have is we have a derelict sites levy, but it's quite difficult for councils to enforce it. Speaking to staff in Dublin City Council, they say the legislation is poorly written and like, for them, like it's, it's, they, they're taking individual people to court one by one if they want, you know, if they want to escalate things even then there's about 10 million euro in unpaid levies in Dublin city alone and.
[00:16:02] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's around 120 odd properties. There's more than 120 properties that are derelict in, in Dublin. You know, I think the, the threshold of what is deemed a derelict needs to be a lot lower. Like I've seen people cases where councils come in and inspect a property and say, no, the roof is still intact so it's not derelict.
It's not going to. That's all you, that's not how it works. You know that, that the bar cannot be that low. The bar has to be a lot higher. And another thing that I mentioned in the local property tax thing, there's about a 3 million euro revolving fund. So Dublin City Council is going to start buying up some vacant and darling properties in inner city areas with that small fund and there will be some other money put into it as well.
Start buying up buildings, refurbish it, redevelop it and then sell it and then put that money back into the fund and then buy more. So, you know, it's. So the fund keeps funding itself. That's something that obviously council is looking into doing over the next couple of years.
So things like, yeah, there's a lot of different initiatives. So it's not just, it's not just investing in transport or other facilities in the area and hoping for the best, leaving proper, leaving buildings vacant and dark. That it is anti social behavior. It is, you are profiting off other people's work. You know, you just kind of, you buy this property. In often vibrant areas of the city, everyone around you is working to improve the area and then when land values go up, you sell and you make profits like that.
[00:17:42] Speaker C: It is, yeah, yeah, very interesting. And look, thanks for all of your insights. Everything is so interesting and I find it so. I find it so nice to see an adult passionate about public transport. Like, you really do strike me as a train child.
It's so nice to see that actually continue. No, but you know what I mean. Like children have so much empathy and so much wonder and so much respect for the environment. People tend to grow out of that. So it's nice to see that it hasn't quite faded from you so much.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: It's really nice to see it's fashionable as well now. Like people are really into like duck and bus, Bowes Jersey for example. But also like people really want it. There's a lot of, there's a lot of GRAs for kind of 2000s 2010's public transport among young people in their 20s and 30s. Like, it's kind of like a cultural thing and it's brilliant to see it.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. It does really seep into the culture. But it's nice to see that maybe the culture is shifting a bit to be a bit more, I don't know, I guess inclusive in that sense. That it can be for everyone, that the bus can be for everyone, that it can be easy, it can be accessible, it can be cheap. So thank you so, so much.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: This is constructive voices.
