Cork Luas plan gets positive feedback from public

The Cork Luas team say there has been fantastic public engagement on the project, and they are hopeful the route will expand in the future.

Speaking to The Echo, Transport Infrastructure Ireland’s Paolo Carbone, head of light rail capital programmes, and Sarah O’Donnell, the Cork Luas project manager, said their informative events had been well attended.

Mr Carbone said: “What’s refreshing is the level of support, though we do appreciate the openness of people telling us their concerns, which will be a great help when selecting the route.”

Ms O’Donnell added: “We’ve had four open days which have been really well attended by people from all backgrounds. The feedback has been positive overall — even where people are impacted they see the bigger picture of the scheme, they just have refinements they’d like to see locally.”

Planning

Once public consultation closes on June 9, the team will take the feedback, consider tweaks to the route, and publish a preferred route “probably in the course of the next year”, Mr Carbone said, adding: “The intention is that we will apply for planning in 2028, but we will try to do better than that.”

The current plan is for the journey to take 35 minutes from Ballincollig to the city, then another 20 minutes from the city to Mahon, with one tram every six minutes.

Ms O’Donnell said: “The main things we’ve heard throughout the consultation is can you built it faster or can you give us more Luas —you’d like to think there would be future network expansion”.

Mr Carbone added: “The network can be expanded later, the most important thing now is to select a good first route.”