Irish Transport Research Network Conference
MacNeill Theatre, Trinity College
05 September 2013
Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Welcome to Trinity College for the fourth annual conference of the Irish Transport Research Network.
I’m delighted to be with you this morning for this conference – here in the MacNeill lecture theatre, named after Trinity’s first professor of engineering. I’m an engineer myself – though mechanical, not civil – and as I said on the recent occasion of the launch of a book on Ireland’s Civil Engineering Heritage, I’m someone who has never lost their sense of romance and excitement about travel and transport, whether by bicycle, car, canal, or plane. Transport touches us all. No-one, wherever they live, can remain unaffected by their country’s transport decisions.
I’m also particularly pleased that this year’s conference is focusing on sustainability and urbanism. A few months ago we launched, in Trinity, our nineteen interdisciplinary research themes in areas which address significant challenges facing humanity today, an area where we already have, or are developing, significant expertise – areas like Ageing, Creative Technologies, and Nanoscience.
‘Smart and Sustainable Cities’ has been chosen as one of these research themes. I hope that the findings of this conference will help deepen our understanding of this key research theme.
What characterises our nineteen research themes is that all are interdisciplinary, drawing on the knowledge and expertise of researchers across faculties and disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is also, of course, key to transport. Transport issues involve planners, architects, builders, engineers, economists, designers, computer scientists, meteorologists, tourist boards, climate change experts, energy experts… Transport is not an area for people who want to sit in their silos! Rather, it’s for people who favour connectivity and exchanges of best practice. Transport is both a public and private sector activity and it brings together higher education, government departments, and industry.
The Irish Transport Research Network recognises all this and, though only of recent creation, it is already an important focus point and meeting opportunity for all involved with transport on the island of Ireland.
I congratulate the Irish Transport Research Network for their crucial role in widening debate and bringing new research to the fore, and I’m delighted that this year they are the conference hosting here in Trinity. I thank the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport for sponsoring this event. And I’m sure you all join me in thanking Dr Brian Caulfield, of our Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, for organising this conference.
Today and tomorrow you will hear papers on cycling and public transport; on energy use, carbon emissions, and climate change; and on traffic flow, and transport choices for people with disabilities. Just the range of papers and subjects shows how wide the Irish Transport Research Network has cast its net and it also shows the breadth of research and expertise that’s required to get transport right.
We can all think of examples where we got transport wrong. Trams were introduced to Dublin in 1872, removed by 1949, and are now being put back, at great expense. The forecourt of the Provost’s House at number one Grafton Street will soon open onto the new cross city LUAS route – and since it’s not a particularly residential route, I guess I’m one of the few who’ll be able to say that.
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I say that removing trams in the first place was the ‘wrong’ decision but of course transport needs are in constant flux. Priorities change all the time. The mid-20th century was the time of the road and the car - the freewheeling gas-guzzling century, if you like – and the automobile did indeed bring great freedom and dynamism to people’s lives. But now concerns about energy supplies and environmental damage mean that we have a new set of requirements for transport. The key word now is the one heightened in this conference and in Trinity’s research theme: sustainability.
While it may not be for me to say that the authorities of the time were wrong to remove Dublin trams in the 1940s, I can say that when that decision was taken, it probably didn’t involve significant consultation with researchers, analysts, and higher education institutions. The kind of consultation and exchange of knowledge between diverse players that we’ll be having over the next two days was simply not the norm then. But we’re certainly the better for it – we’re better for valuing what higher education institutions can contribute to the public good through their independent opinion on society.
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Like many of us, I guess, I’ve been reading and listening to Seamus Heaney for the week that’s in it, and I found an early poem of his, ‘The Peninsula’, which resonates, I think, with some of the themes of this conference. It begins:
“When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks so you will not arrive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.”
And the poem ends:
“And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.”
Well he wrote that over forty years ago, in 1969. But I think now, when we talk about sustainability in transport, we are talking about uncoding all landscapes to make sure that we do indeed understand and preserve those “things founded clean on their own shapes.”
Thank you.
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