Cassandra Voices

Tag: does

  • Sahel: Water does not become bitter without cause

     

    Ruwa baya tsami a banza:

    Water does not become bitter without cause.

    There is a reason for everything.

    The Sahel throughout history has been known for many things. To the historically inclined, it is the region that produced empires like Wagadu, Mali and Songhai, and cities of world renown like Timbuktu. Today, the Sahel represents something else entirely: instability, as it faces climate variability, insurgency, and fragile governance.

    2020 Analysis of the regional crisis. Source https://erccportal.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ECHO-Products/Maps#/maps/3330.

    Stretching from Senegal in the west through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, northern Nigeria and onward to Chad and Sudan in the east, this 6,000 kilometre zone has produced more military coups in the last decade than anywhere else on earth. Since 2020 alone: Mali twice, Guinea, Burkina Faso twice, Niger, and Sudan, the latter embroiled in a devastating conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces that has already killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. The media dubbed it the coup belt. Security analysts called it the Sahel crisis. Outside powers, Russia, France, the Gulf states, the United States, manoeuvred for influence in a fracturing landscape.

    What almost nobody asked, at least not with any seriousness, was the historical question: what was here before?

    Not merely before the coups. Before the colonial borders that manufactured these states, before the French administrative systems that shaped their governments, before the extraction economies that defined their relationship to the world market.

    What was the political and economic life of this zone when it was organised according to its own internal logic, by its own institutions, on the basis of its own material conditions? That is what I seek to explore through this platform.

    This is not out of a sense of reactionary nostalgia. You cannot understand what a place has become without understanding what it was, what forces transformed it, and which of those transformations built capacity and which destroyed it. Northern Nigeria today is associated, in the global imagination and in too much of the Nigerian imagination, with poverty, insurgency and dysfunction.

    Boko Haram. Bandits. The caricature of Sharia law deployed by politicians as a tool of control. Coups next door. Violence and weapons spilling across borders drawn by colonial administrators through the middle of communities, trade networks and political relationships that had existed for centuries before European powers decided they had the right to divide the continent at a conference table in Berlin.

    These things did not come from nowhere. To understand where they came from, we have to look at the land itself, how it shaped the people, and how the people shaped it.

    The Shore of the Great Sea of Sand

    Orthographic Map of Africa showing the Sahelian Zone. Source : wikimedia commons. Author : Flockedereisbaer

    Sāhil in Arabic means coast or shore. In the imagination of the Arab geographers of the Middle Ages, the Sahara was not a wall. It was a sea. The camel earns its nickname, ship of the desert, honestly. It allowed merchants to make the months-long voyage across that vast expanse, linking the Mediterranean world to West Africa. The Sahel was the southern shoreline of that sea.

    A shoreline is not a remote frontier. It is the first point of arrival. Goods land there, get taxed, get redistributed. The people who control the access points accumulate wealth and build institutions. The cities that grew along this shoreline, Timbuktu, Gao, Agadez, Aoudaghost, and later Katsina and Kano, were structural consequences of that position. Constantinople sat at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and extracted enormous wealth from that geography for over a thousand years. Timbuktu sat where the gold and salt trades intersected and grew exceptionally wealthy, connecting North Africa and the Mediterranean to the productive interior of West Africa. Whoever controlled such a position could tax trade moving in both directions, access goods otherwise unavailable, and hold a structural advantage over competitors. Geography does not determine history, but it sets the terms on which history unfolds.

    The Sudan: Climate, Geography, Ecology

    The African landscape is a varied one. Moving southward from the Sahara toward the equator, rainfall increases steadily and the vegetation responds in distinct bands. Each band runs roughly east-west across the continent, with the rainfall gradient running north-south.

    To understand what this means in practice, follow an imaginary merchant setting out from Sijilmasa, the great Moroccan terminus of the trans-Saharan trade, sometime in the 11th or 12th century. He has loaded his camels with slabs of Saharan salt, bolts of North African cloth, and copper ingots from the Mediterranean world. His destination is the markets of the Sudan. His journey south will carry him through several worlds in succession, each one wetter, greener, and more densely populated than the last.

    The northernmost inhabited zone is the Sahara itself: less than 150 millimetres of rain annually, vast, arid, traversable only with knowledge accumulated over generations. The Tamashek, Tubu and Amazigh peoples hold this world. They know where water sits beneath the surface and how the seasonal winds move. Our merchant cannot cross without them. He pays a toll and hires guides, folding the cost into the price his goods will command at the other end. The Sahara is dangerous and expensive, which is precisely why the goods that cross it are worth crossing it for.

    After weeks of travel, the landscape shifts. The hard gravel plains of the deep Sahara give way to the Sahel proper, where annual rainfall runs between 150 and 600 millimetres. Semi-arid steppe. Thorny acacia scrub. A landscape suited to pastoral herding and seasonal movement, in most areas not adequate for settled cultivation. The few cities that exist here become all the more important for their scarcity. At Taghaza, our merchant loads additional blocks of rock salt, a commodity mined there by enslaved labourers under brutal conditions. Salt is so essential to life in the agricultural south that it commands near its weight in gold at certain markets. That simple fact drives the entire commercial logic of the Saharan world. At Timbuktu or Walata, he enters a different order of things entirely: a city of scholars, merchants and administrators sitting at the junction of the desert routes and the productive Sudan. He exchanges his salt and Mediterranean goods for gold, kola nuts and leather goods from the south. He hears news of the markets further inland. He weighs whether to press on or turn back.

    He presses on. The landscape rewards his decision. Trees thicken. Grass grows tall between them. The soil deepens. The dusty, pale earth of the Sahara gives way to the red laterite soil familiar to anyone who has spent time in West Africa, rich and dense underfoot. Annual rainfall here ranges between 600 and 1,200 millimetres. The growing season runs long enough for reliable grain cultivation. Millet, sorghum, cotton, groundnuts. Cattle graze across the open woodland. Horses are kept and bred. Populations concentrate in numbers impossible further north. Cities grow large and stay large because the surrounding land can feed them across many consecutive years without exhaustion.

    This is the bilād al-sūdān, the land of the black people, the broad belt of productive savanna the Arab geographers named and described across centuries of writing. In modern ecological terminology it carries the name Sudanian savanna, though the medieval Arabic name carries more historical weight. This is the zone our merchant has been trying to reach from the moment he loaded his camels in Sijilmasa. These markets, these consumers, and this world were the reason he carried everything across the desert.

    He has arrived in the agricultural heartland of West Africa.

    Further south still, the Guinea savanna thickens into closed forest, where rainfall exceeds 1,500 millimetres annually, the canopy closes over, and the tsetse fly kills cattle and makes cavalry warfare almost impossible. Powerful and institutionally sophisticated states flourished in this region: Oyo, Benin, Asante. Each connected to the same continent-spanning trade network through chains of regional merchants and intermediaries. Our merchant will not venture this far. His goods travel the rest of the way through other hands, through the networks of Mande-speaking Dyula traders and Hausa fatake who specialised in exactly this kind of relay commerce. He sells to them, and they carry his salt southward to people he will never meet.

    What Each Zone Produces and Why it Matters

    Salt commands near its weight in gold at certain markets.

    Salt from the Sahara. Robin Taylor, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    The Saharan mines at Bilma, Kawar, and Taghaza produce a mineral that the agricultural populations of the Sudan belt cannot produce for themselves in adequate quantities. Salt preserves food, seasons it, and maintains the biological functions of people and their animals. Without access to it, agricultural communities weaken and decline. This biological necessity is what drives human beings to organise caravans of hundreds of animals across one of the most hostile environments on earth, month after month, generation after generation.

    Gold flows in the opposite direction. The forest zone of West Africa contains some of the richest alluvial gold deposits in the pre-modern world, worked by Akan-speaking miners in what is today Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. That gold fed the monetary systems of medieval North Africa and Europe. It funded the Fatimid Caliphate. It built the great mosques of Morocco. European monetary expansion from the 13th century onward depended substantially on West African gold long before Europeans had any direct access to West Africa at all. The forest zone also produces kola nuts, a mild, bitter stimulant that became the social currency of Muslim West Africa wherever Islamic law prohibited alcohol. Kola travels without refrigeration, remains potent for weeks, and carries ritual significance at ceremonies from Senegambia to the Niger Delta. Hausa merchants built entire trading empires on the kola circuit alone. The ancestors of Nigeria’s richest Man Aliko Dangote were Agalawa merchants who grew wealthy through the Kola trade.

    Cotton cloth and leather goods move in every direction. The Sudanic region weaves and dyes cloth that North African and Saharan buyers prize. It tans hides into leather goods, sandals, saddlebags and harnesses, whose quality the Mediterranean world cannot match from its own resources.

    None of these zones is self-sufficient. The pressure toward exchange is structural, not incidental. It does not require any particular ruler to decide to encourage trade. It arises from the complementarity of the zones themselves, from the fact that survival and prosperity in each depends on what the others produce. The political consequences of this logic are enormous. Controlling the transit points between zones, taxing the movement of goods across ecological boundaries, is one of the primary mechanisms of wealth accumulation in pre-modern West Africa. The empires that rise and dominate this region do not, for the most part, produce the commodities they trade. They sit between the producers and the consumers, and they tax the passage.

    The Empires of the Sudan: Power Built on Position

    Map of the Wagadu empire. Luxo, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

    The empire the Arabs called Ghana, and which its own people knew as Wagadu, built the first great demonstration of this logic. Rising in the western Sudan, probably by the 4th or 5th century CE, Wagadu sat between the gold-producing regions of the south and the North African merchants hungry for that gold. The state did not mine the gold. It taxed it.

    The Arab geographer Al-Bakri, writing in 1068, recorded the precise mechanism. The king of Wagadu levied a tax of one dinar of gold on every donkey load of salt entering the country, and two dinars on every load leaving it. He charged five mithqals on a load of copper and ten mithqals on a load of finished goods. Gold nuggets found in the mines belonged entirely to the crown. Private citizens could trade gold dust freely, but the crown entirely monopolised nuggets, which could be used as money and accumulate political power. Al-Bakri described the king’s court audience: the ruler sat in a domed pavilion surrounded by horses wearing golden halters, dogs wearing golden collars guarding his doors, and ten pages standing to his right carrying shields and swords decorated with gold. Behind him stood the sons of subordinate kings, their hair interlaced with gold.

    This is not just for the sake of flexing, although that played a part. It is a public display of the fiscal power the state extracts from its position in the trade network. The gold on those horses and dogs and sword hilts passed through Wagadu’s markets and Wagadu’s tax offices. They represent accumulated transit fees, turned into symbols of authority.

    Wagadu extended its reach from Takrur in the Senegambia region east to the Niger, controlling the western trans-Saharan routes for several centuries. Its decline came gradually from the 11th century onward, through a combination of Almoravid pressure, internal rebellions, and the progressive southward shift of gold-producing communities beyond its reach. There is scholarly debate today about whether Almoravid pressure was military or commercial and how decisive a role it played in Wagadu’s decline.

    Mali

    Its successor took the same logic further and built something larger.

    The Mali Empire of the Mansas reached from the Atlantic coast to the Niger bend at its height in the 13th and 14th centuries, incorporating the gold-producing Bambuk and Bure fields directly into its territory rather than simply taxing their output from a distance. This shift from transit taxation to direct control of production represented a significant intensification of the model. Mali did not abandon the transit fees; it added productive control on top of them.

    The wealth this generated was genuinely staggering. In 1324, Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, performed the hajj to Mecca and passed through Cairo on the way. He travelled with a retinue reportedly numbering in the tens of thousands and distributed so much gold in Cairo and along the route that he single-handedly triggered an inflationary crisis in the Egyptian gold market. Contemporary Arabic sources record that the price of gold in Cairo had still not fully recovered twelve years later. One man’s pilgrimage gift-giving destabilised a regional monetary economy for over a decade. That is what the structural control of the Sudan’s gold output looked like in practice.

    Mansa Musa Depicted on the Catalan Atlas, Abraham Cresques, 1375. public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

    Under the Mansas, Timbuktu became the intellectual capital of the Sudan. The Sankore Mosque and its associated scholarly networks attracted students and teachers from across the Islamic world. Mali’s trading diaspora, the Wangara and Dyula merchants who spread out from the empire’s commercial networks, carried Islam southward and eastward into regions the empire itself never directly controlled. They built mosques in market towns across the savanna, established the contract forms and credit mechanisms of Islamic commercial law, and created the social infrastructure that later Islamic reform movements would draw on and contest.

    Songhai

    Map of the Songhai Empire. HetmanTheResearcher, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    The last and among the largest of the great Sudanic empires rose from within Mali’s shadow and eventually consumed it.

    Songhai centred on Gao in the Niger bend, a city that had been a significant commercial centre for centuries before the empire’s rise. Initially a tributary state under Mali, Songhai began asserting independence in the mid-15th century under Sunni Ali Ber, a military commander of exceptional energy who spent nearly three decades in almost continuous campaigning, capturing Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473 and turning the Niger river into Songhai’s internal highway. Sunni Ali understood something that his predecessors had sometimes neglected: control of the river meant control of the grain trade that fed the cities of the Sudan, which meant leverage over the urban populations and scholarly classes on which commercial empires depended.

    His successor, Askia Muhammad, who seized power in 1493 and built the empire’s administrative and intellectual infrastructure, brought Timbuktu to its peak. By the late 15th century, Timbuktu held a population that contemporary sources estimated at up to 100,000 people. The Sankore Mosque alone had 25,000 students. The city imported books from across North Africa and the Middle East and produced its own manuscript tradition that scholars are still cataloguing today. Askia Muhammad undertook his own famous hajj in 1496, arriving in Cairo and Mecca with gold but also with political questions: he sought a fatwa from the Egyptian scholar al-Suyuti legitimising his deposition of Sunni Ali’s dynasty. Religion and political authority were inseparable, and the caliphs and scholars of the east were the sources of legitimacy that Sudanic rulers sought.

    Songhai’s collapse came suddenly. In 1591, a Moroccan army under Judar Pasha crossed the Sahara with something no Sudanic army had yet faced: firearms. At the Battle of Tondibi on the Niger, Moroccan muskets and cannon scattered a Songhai cavalry force many times larger. It was the first use of firearms south of the Sahara in a major engagement, and it exposed a structural vulnerability that the military architecture of the savanna empires had never needed to address before. Songhai fragmented. The Moroccan forces could conquer but not administer an empire of that scale from their North African base. The Sudan entered a period of political fragmentation that would define it for the following century.

    Kanem-Bornu: The Ancient State of the Central Sudan

    Kanem-Bornu at its greatest extent by Megartonius, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    While Wagadu, Mali and Songhai rose and fell in the western Sudan, a different political tradition took root in the east and proved more durable than any of them.

    The state centred on Lake Chad, known first as Kanem and later as Bornu, appears in Arabic sources as early as the 9th century. The Dugawa dynasty that founded it controlled the central trans-Saharan corridor running through the Fezzan in modern Libya, connecting the Mediterranean directly to the Lake Chad basin and the agricultural lands to its south and west. Where the western Sudan empires built their power on the gold routes, Kanem-Bornu built on a different set of commodities: enslaved people, ivory and natron, the sodium carbonate mineral used across the Arab world for soap-making, food preservation and glass production.

    Islam arrived at the Kanem court around the 11th century, making it one of the earliest Muslim polities in Africa south of the Sahara. The conversion was not merely spiritual. It gave Kanem’s rulers access to the networks of Islamic scholarship, commerce and political legitimacy that connected the Sudan to the wider Muslim world. The Mai sent students to study in North Africa and brought back scholars to staff his administration. He corresponded with the Sultan of Morocco and the rulers of Egypt as a fellow Muslim sovereign. Islam provided the institutional language through which Kanem-Bornu organised its bureaucracy, justified its laws, and conducted its diplomacy.

    That bureaucracy proved extraordinarily resilient. The state survived internal rebellions, external invasions. The realm persisted after the forced relocation of its capital from Kanem, east of the lake, to Bornu, west of it in the 14th century, a massive institutional disruption that most states would not have survived. It survived the disruptions of the 16th century that destroyed Songhai. It adapted, reformed, and persisted across ten centuries of continuous existence, making it arguably the most durable state institution in West African history.

    That durability rested on a resource base that demands honest accounting. Bornu was not merely complicit in the trans-Saharan slave trade. For long periods, it organised and profited from it at scale. The state taxed the movement of enslaved people northward through its territory. Elite households depended on enslaved labour for agriculture, craft production and domestic work. Military expansion into the territories to the south and west was partly organised around the capture of people who would be sold northward or retained within the state economy. This was not an aberration imposed on an otherwise pristine political economy. The capture of people was structurally embedded in how Bornu accumulated and distributed surplus, how its ruling class maintained itself, and how it funded the military capacity that kept it intact. A history that omits this is not an honest history.

    Bornu’s influence radiated westward into Hausaland across many centuries. The political vocabulary of the Hausa city-states carries the fingerprints of this contact. The title Ciroma, used in Hausa courts for a senior ranked position, is a Kanuri borrowing from Bornu. Galadima, another major Hausa title, has the same eastern roots. The Bayajidda foundational legend, which we will examine carefully in the next essay, routes the origin of the Hausa states through Bornu for reasons that are not accidental. Bornu was the dominant power of the central Sudan for most of the period in which the Hausa city-states were forming their institutions. Its administrative models, its Islamic scholarly networks, and its commercial relationships all shaped what Hausaland became. The reign of Mai Idris Alooma was the Apogee of the polity and it would slowly decline in the centuries following his reign. I will cover his reign with the care it deserves in its own essay.

    Bornu’s power and influence would wane over the centuries, driven by shifting trade routes, environmental changes and the rise of powerful rivals like the Usmanid/Sokoto Caliphate. The state met its end in 1900, when Rabeh Zubayr, a Sudanese warlord and former slave soldier who had carved his way across the central Sudan with a disciplined firearms-equipped army, besieged and destroyed the Bornu capital. Rabeh’s conquest coincided almost exactly with the arrival of French colonial forces from the west and British forces from the south. The three-way collision finished what a millennium of rivals had failed to do. Bornu, which had outlasted Wagadu, Mali and Songhai by centuries, fell not to any single force but to the specific conjuncture of the 1890s, when the internal disruption of Rabeh’s campaign intersected with the external pressure of European colonial conquest at the worst possible moment.

    Our merchant from Sijilmasa, had he lived long enough and travelled far enough east, would have recognised the world of Bornu: the same logic of transit taxation, the same integration of Islamic commercial law into the fabric of trade, the same cities growing wealthy at the junction of ecological zones. But he would also have noticed something different about the political terrain further west, in the territory that Bornu influenced but did not control. A cluster of city-states, each independent, each competitive, each building its own institutions and its own commercial networks. Fragmented where Bornu was unified. Commercially distributed where Bornu was centrally administered. Younger in its political consolidation but extraordinarily dynamic.

    Why Any of this Matters

    The empires described in this essay did not exist in a separate, sealed-off past with no connection to the present. They were the product of specific material conditions, specific ecological positions, and institutional choices made over centuries. Wagadu’s wealth stemmed from the trans-Saharan trade, Songhai’s internal highway was the Niger river, and Bornu’s millennium-long anchor was the Lake Chad basin; these assets did not vanish with the empires’ demise. The geography remained. The ecological logic endured. Trade routes remained, at least until colonial borders, railway lines and artificial tariff walls were drawn through them.

    What changed was who controlled them and in whose interest they operated.

    The colonial partition of the 1880s and 1890s did not encounter an empty or stagnant landscape. It encountered the successor states of a thousand years of Sudanic political development, states that had survived the collapse of Songhai, the disruption of the trans-Saharan routes, and centuries of internal competition. What colonialism did was reorganise that landscape. It redirected trade routes toward coastal ports and away from the Saharan corridors that had sustained the interior for centuries. Wherever it preserved certain institutions, the emirate system in northern Nigeria being the most consequential example, it did so in forms useful to administrators rather than local populations. It created borders that cut through the agricultural zones, pastoral routes and commercial networks that the ecological logic of the region had generated over centuries. And it extracted resources with none of the internal redistribution, however unequal and often brutal, that the older state systems had practised. The Sahelian Juntas claim to have seized power to right those wrongs, but only time will tell.

    Captain Ibrahim Traore, Military Leader of Burkina Faso. Source Bamjo226, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

    The coup belt is the inheritance of that reorganisation. The states collapsing today did not build on the institutional foundations of Wagadu, Mali, or Bornu. They were built on colonial administrative frameworks that prioritised control over capacity, extraction over development, and the convenience of outside powers over the coherence of local political economies. The Sahel crisis is not evidence that this region cannot sustain complex political life. The record described in this essay is the evidence against that claim. It is evidence that the specific political structures imposed over the last century have failed, and that understanding why requires going further back than the coups, further back than independence, further back than colonialism itself.

    That is the work of this series: https://thesahelianrecord7.substack.com/

    Feature Image: Jillian Amatt – Artistic Voyages on Unsplash

    Sources:

    Al-Bakri, Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik (Book of Routes and Realms), c. 1068, in Basil Davidson, The African Past (Penguin Books, 1966), p. 81

    Brooks, George E., Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Westview Press, 1993)

    Hunwick, John O., Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill, 1999)

    Last, Murray, The Sokoto Caliphate (Longmans, 1967)

    Levtzion, Nehemia, Ancient Ghana and Mali (Methuen, 1973)

    Levtzion, Nehemia and J.F.P. Hopkins (eds.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge University Press, 1981)

    Lovejoy, Paul E., Salt of the Desert Sun (Cambridge University Press, 1986)

    Lovejoy, Paul E., Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1983)

    Lovejoy, Paul E., Caravans of Kola (Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980)

    Trimingham, J. Spencer, A History of Islam in West Africa (Oxford University Press, 1962)

    Webb, James L.A. Jr., Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change Along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)

  • Does Dublin Require 3 Railway Systems?

    The future of urban transport policy lies not in expansion but in the intelligent use of existing traffic areas.  The objective of ensuring mobility for people travelling to work and shopping and during leisure time requires urban traffic management based on modern information technology.
    Ernst Joos, Deputy Director of Zurich Transport. ‘Lessons in Transportation Planning from Zurich.  Economy and Ecology are not contradictions.’ (Lecture, Dublin Transportation Office, Embassy of Switzerland, Dublin, June 10 1999)

    Over the past twenty-five years, those responsible for managing Dublin have failed to draw any lessons from Zurich, one of the most desirable cities in the world in which to live. If they had, they would not now be seriously proposing to add yet another railway system to the two already existing. The proposed MetroLink is a completely different system to the existing LUAS (light rail) and DART/Commuter services (heavy rail). LUAS trams will be unable to run on the MetroLink rail, and vice versa (see About, Frequently Asked Questions, MetroLink – The Basics, par 6).

    Resources committed to MetroLink (€500m to date) have crowded out the development of other, less costly, options which would, by now, have made it easier to move around our capital city region.

    Place-making – an approach to urban planning and design that focuses on the people who use a space, rather than just the physical structures or buildings. The idea is to create places that are not just functional, but also beautiful and meaningful to the people who live, work, and play there. This has long been overlooked by the governing networks of politicians, senior public servants, policy makers, as well as the relevant planners, engineers, economists, architects, property developers and builders. Focusing on competitiveness alone will not make our capital city a pleasant place to live, work and linger.

    For some time, there has been a deliberate policy of removing through traffic from a small part of Dublin city centre. MetroLink is the most recent iteration by insiders/incumbents who did not follow through on the 1998 government decision to build a mainly on-street light rail system for Dublin.

    As proposed, MetroLink (costing anywhere from €12bn to €23bn) again fails to ensure that place-making objectives are applied consistently, and with equal force, throughout our capital city.

    Ballymun provides an excellent example of this failure. When the 1960s-built-suburb was regenerated during the 1990s, the main street of this residential area became a six-lane highway for through traffic. Such traffic is a major form of community severance.

    The proposed MetroLink will be in a tunnel, under the main street which will still have through traffic. National and local politicians, policymakers and interest groups support this. Yet the same people are actively restricting such through traffic from the city centre.

    The Government decision to extend LUAS to Finglas is an opportunity to reset the go-stop-go practices of the past twenty-five years. Our public authorities can use this to keep the experienced staff and supply chains needed to build LUAS networks serving other parts of Dublin (e.g. Drumcondra, Santry, Ballymun, Beaumont, Coolock, Edenmore, Lucan, Clondalkin, Ballyfermot, the south city centre, Harold’s Cross, Terenure, Rathfarnham, Dundrum). People in Cork and Galway would also benefit from this focus as they too adopt LUAS-type services.

    Sustaining urban areas requires the application of mutually reinforcing measures consistently over decades. Instead of being focused on the creation and maintenance of places which raise the quality of life, development in Dublin has been reduced to a very limited form of building control on a project-by-project basis.

    We can enhance our cities by adopting stable policies and continuous investment. But we cannot rely on what emerges from different programmes for government, each drawn up for a single electoral cycle of no more than five years. Rapid decision-making on arbitrary projects has not worked to make housing affordable, or available, in the Dublin area. Nor will similar incoherence deliver an attractive public transport network.

    LUAS Disconnect

    This perpetuates a lack of insight that resulted in two disconnected LUAS lines. There are no plans to remedy this lack of joined up thinking.

    On April 8, 2025 the Government approved the Revised National Planning Framework. This recognises the issue of Sustainable Mobility (National Strategic Outcome 5 p.161-2). Dublin and other Irish cities and major urban areas are heavily dependent on road and private, mainly car-based, transport with the result that there is more and more congestion.

    The National Development Plan makes provision for transformational investment in public transport and sustainable mobility solutions in the main urban centres that will progressively put in place a more sustainable alternative. For example, major public transport infrastructure projects identified in the Transport Strategy for the Greater Dublin Area to 2042 – such as the MetroLink and DART+ as well as the Luas and Bus Connects investment programmes – will keep our capital and other key urban areas competitive.

    In the Greater Dublin Area Transport Strategy 2022 –2042, the National Transport Authority (NTA) continues to spin the idea that LUAS is networked, when our experience is otherwise (‘Greater Dublin Area Transport Strategy 2022-2042’ asserts that ‘in conjunction with Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), in December 2017 we opened Luas Cross City, linking the Red and Green lines and providing an interchange between commuter rail and Luas at Broombridge.’ p.11).

    What is worse, NTA persists with this bluster despite their own strategy showing clearly that they propose more lines which are not interlinked.

    Figure 1. Dublin Light Rail (now LUAS) as proposed.

    In 1997, Dublin’s light rail was proposed as one interconnected system (see Figure 1). However, the Dublin Chamber of Commerce opposed on street LUAS. In May 1998, the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat government decided to develop Dublin’s light rail system (now LUAS) as follows

    1. Phase 1 – Line A from Tallaght to Middle Abbey Street;
    2. Phase 2- Line B from Sandyford to Sr. Stephen’s Green;
    3. Phase 3 – an eastward extension of Line A from Middle Abbey Street to Connolly and perhaps then on to the Docklands;
    4. Phase 4 – an underground extension of Line A to Broadstone then continuing with surface running to Finglas and the Dublin Airport.

    This bizarre decision meant that another depot (for maintenance etc.) had to be built for Line B (now the Green Line), as the Red Cow depot (now on the Red line) could not service trams, although it was designed and built for three LUAS lines!

    At the time, I estimated that the cost of connecting the two lines was about the same as the cost of acquiring a site and building another depot. The only remaining green space next to the Sandyford Business district became the depot. Recently Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council re-zoned an existing brownfield site to create public open spaces.  This was a belated response to the growth of offices and residences in that area.

    Nothing was done to build the Phase 4 short tunnel under the city centre, as decided in 1998. Shortly afterwards, in 2001, the Government had an opportunity to correct its basic error when ‘A Platform for Change. Final Report An integrated transportation strategy for the Greater Dublin Area 2000 to 2016’ was published.

    Figure 2. LUAS-on-street light rail.

    This proposed an on-street LUAS network (see Figure 2) as one of a set of mutually reinforcing measures designed to make it easier to move around the Greater Dublin Area. Note that this report proposed, inter alia:

    1. A LUAS line through Drumcondra to Dublin Airport with a spur line to Howth Junction, which has DART and commuter rail services;
    2. A Docklands loop across a then proposed bridge at Macken Street– now the Samuel Beckett Bridge.
    3. The LUAS Green line was to be upgraded to Metro.
    Figure 3. METRO segregated light rail.

    The Metro then proposed is radically different to MetroLink. The decision to extend the Green LUAS line through Broadstone to Broombridge on-street foreclosed the possibility of having a short tunnel between Ranelagh and Broadstone, as the Government decided in 1998.

    To see what a mutually-reinforcing set of rail-based options for the Dublin looks like see Figure 4. Bus services were supposed to be designed to complement this.

    Figure 4 Integrated rail transport for Greater Dublin Area

    Back to the Future

    It is time for a reset for MetroLink, which it is projected will cost up to a staggering €23 billion, which is two or three times the original estimate, especially given the economic uncertainty that has arisen since Donald Trump became President in January 2025.

    The application to extend the Green Line LUAS to Finglas is an opportunity to extend that project to Dublin Airport, as Cathal Daughton pointed out in a recent article. While welcome, the extension of the LUAS Green Line from Broombridge in Cabra to Charlestown in Finglas should have continued the additional 3km to Dublin Airport to create a city centre-airport rail link while the Metro is being built.

    TII estimate that the 4km LUAS Finglas project will cost between €420 and €720 million. Getting to the Airport could be done by extending LUAS through Ballymun to the old airport road at Santry (see Figures 14 and 15). That route would avoid the cost of going over or under the M50, in addition to serving more residential and business areas.

    Is journey time between Dublin City Centre and the Airport an issue?

    NTA published a number of Dublin Airport passenger surveys over the past twenty-five years .  These reports show that most passengers: take less than one hour to get to the Airport (see Figure 5); are travelling for holiday/leisure/visiting family friends (see Figure 6); and are not going to Dublin City Centre (see Figure 7).

    Figure 5. Journey Times to Dublin Airport 2001-2022.
    Figure 6. Trip purpose Dublin Airport passengers 1998 – 2022.

    The NTA reports show the purpose of passenger travel has scarcely changed over the past twenty-five years. This suggests that most passengers are not pressed for time.

    As regards the landside origin/destination of these passengers, NTA collected the data in surveys done in 2001, 2011, 2016 and 2022. The published reports do not, however, contain summary data for the years 2016 and 2022. The reports of the 2016 and 2022 surveys do not contain any explanation for this omission. The published data from the 2001 and 2011 reports show that less than one-quarter were going to/coming from Dublin City Centre (See Figure 7).  Any passengers that need faster journey times between Dublin Airport and the city centre have the options of getting taxis which can go through the Port Tunnel and use bus lanes.

    Why has the National Transport Authority (NTA) stopped publishing data on the landside origins/destinations of Dublin Airport passengers? Without such data, how can trends be assessed as a basis for investment?

    This does not correspond with what Robert Watt (then Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform) wrote in 2017. Among the outputs in 2014 from these economists is the Comprehensive Expenditure Report 2015-2017, a review of agri-taxation measures, and an evidence-based Strategic Framework for Investment in Land Transport. This work is high-quality economic analysis undertaken by Irish Civil Servants [my emphasis].

    Figure 7. Dublin Airport Passengers landside origin 2001, 2011.

    Arrival times for passengers departing Dublin Airport

    TII claim that MetroLink will result in morning peak journey time savings of fourteen minutes from St. Stephen’s Green to Dublin Airport. During weekdays, the morning peak (mainly into Dublin) is from 07.00-10.00 with an evening peak from 16.00–19.00 (mainly out of Dublin).

    NTA reported on the departure times of departing passengers. The reports for 2001 and 2011 did not contain this data aligned with peak hour travel times, see Figure 8. However, the 2016 and 2022 reports did, see Figure 9.

    Figure 8. Time of Arrival at Dublin Airport for Departing Passengers 2001, 2011.

    The 2016 and 2022 results offers insight on the impact of airport travel at peak commuting times. Note that the fourteen minute time saving is on a journey that is in the opposite direction to the normal city-centre inbound traffic we hear about in traffic bulletins covering the 07.00-10.00 morning peak.

    For 2022 (see Figure 9), over 70% of departing passengers travelled to Dublin Airport outside the peak commuting times of 07.00-10.00 and 16.00-19.00. This is up from the 60% reported on for 2016. This lack of fit between peak commuting times and the times when most people travel between the Airport and the city centre is not a robust basis for offering a cost-benefit of this MetroLink project.

    Figure 9  Time of Arrival at Dublin Airport for Departing Passengers 2016, 2022

    Commuting in the Dublin area

    Census 2016 maps (Figures 10 and 11) suggest that most commuting within the Greater Dublin Area within the M50; along corridors; to the North West (Blanchardstown N3/M3 corridor); the west (north/south of the N4/M4 Lucan Clondalkin area); the south-west (N7 Naas Road, N82 Tallaght).

    Neither Dublin Airport nor Swords stand out as places which call for exceptional investment to enhance public transport for people who live and/or work in those locations.

    The reports of the latest Census do not reproduce these maps. The Central Statistics Office (CSO) did not give any reason for dropping these maps from the Census 2022 report on commuting.

    Figure 10. Feeder Towns into each Dublin Census 2016.
    Figure 11. Catchment area of major workplace locations.

    North Dublin Compared to other parts of Dublin

    More people live in the north part of Dublin City than in any other part the Dublin area (see Figures 12 and 13). This has been the case for the past thirty years.

    Why is this area getting less attention for enhancing public transport than the route to Swords?

    Figure 12 Dublin City North population compared to other areas in Dublin 1991-2022.
    Figure 13. Dublin City North population compared to Fingal 1991-2022.

    Fingal East and Fingal West are based on the study area used for the NTA/AECOM Fingal/North Dublin Transport Study. These areas do not correspond to the new Dáil constituencies, which replaced Dublin North for the 2024 General Election.

    Comparing the North part of Dublin City to Cork is revealing. Earlier this month, the NTA began public consultation on the Emerging Preferred Route (EPR) for an eighteen kilometre twenty-station LUAS line for Cork. This is to support the objective of Cork becoming the fastest-growing city in Ireland over the next twenty years, with a targeted growth in population of 50 to 60 percent.

    In 2022, Cork City had a population of just 224,000. Growing by 50% (to 336,000) would mean that Cork’s population would still be less than the 346,000 people now living in the north part of Dublin city in 2022.

    A LUAS loop for Dublin North City

    In 2015, I commissioned two maps from the All-Island Regional Observatory (AIRO). These showed the then existing and proposed rail-based commuter services superimposed on, firstly Dublin’s Economic Core were measured as having more than seven hundred jobs per square kilometre; and secondly population density in the Dublin area, based on the then most recent Census 2011.

    In March 2024, I recommissioned an update based on the 2022 Census and the proposed MetroLink. On these, I superimposed a proposal for a North City LUAS Loop (see Figures 14 and 15)

    This North City LUAS loop would better serve the over one and a half million people in the Greater Dublin Area than the proposed MetroLink, as it recognises that most commuting takes place within the M50.

    This forms a network with the existing LUAS system, unlike the proposed MetroLink. It also serves parts of Dublin in which most people live. Furthermore, it would cost about €7 billion, i.e. less than a third of the estimated €23 billion MetroLink is projected to cost, and extends the proposed Finglas LUAS to sustain a programme of experience and supply chains required for LUAS in other urban areas, such as Cork and Galway.

    Ever since the 1998 decision to build LUAS, siloed thinking has prevailed. The public authorities did not follow through on the decisions taken then. MetroLink is just the latest example of that kind of ‘ad-hocery.’

    They have misdirected investment, as is clear by the failure to create a single integrated LUAS network as the key element of a series of mutually -reinforcing measures to enhance our capital city region.

    Figure 14. LUAS Loop North Dublin’s Core Economic Area Census 2022.
    Figure 15. LUAS Loop North Dublin Population Density Census 2022.

    Firstly, this proposed North City LUAS loop serves the northern part of Dublin’s Core Economic Area and the populated areas comprehensively, taking in Phibsboro’, Cabra, Finglas; Poppintree, Charlestown, Ballymun, Northwood; Santry, Dublin Airport, Swords, Drumcondra; Coolock, Beaumont, Kilmore, Edenmore, Donaghmede;

    Secondly it is integrated with LUAS and could link with a Docklands (North and South) LUAS loop using the Samuel Becket Bridge which is designed to carry LUAS.

    Thirdly, it offers two rail-based links between the Central Business District and Dublin Airport in addition to transport services which use the Port Tunnel, i.e. a direct link on LUAS via either Drumcondra or LUAS CrossCity; an indirect using DART/Commuter services at Howth Junction. There are also links with heavy rail services on the Maynooth/Mullingar/Longford line at both Drumcondra and Broombridge.

    It would also serve important trip attractors/generators including Mater/Cappagh/Beaumont/UPMC medical centres, Croke and Tolka Parks, all the DCU campuses, the Marino Institute of Education in addition to industrial areas at Coolock/Clonshaugh and Santry Finally it offers services to more areas experiencing social deprivation than the proposed MetroLink route.

    It would also serve important landmarks including Mater/Cappagh/Beaumont hospitals, Croke and Tolka Parks, all of the DCU campuses, the Marino Institute of Education. Finally it offers services to more areas experiencing social deprivation than the proposed MetroLink route.

    In its January 2025 Annual Review AECOM – an international consultancy company – called for programmatic thinking as a basis for investment in our future:

    As the world of infrastructure evolves, programmatic thinking is reshaping how organisations across the world approach planning and delivery. This shift to a cohesive, programme-based perspective is also gaining traction across the island of Ireland  It requires not only consistent, multi-annual funding but also a cultural change within individual delivery organisations in how projects are planned, prioritised, and executed.

    As proposed, MetroLink is the polar opposite of this kind of thinking. It reflects the politics of grand gestures more than quiet competence applied consistently over many election cycles.

    Ten years ago, NTA summarised the case for light rail in Dublin see Figure 16.  Despite the population growth, this still makes sense.

    Figure 16. Extract from NTA/AECOM Fingal/North Dublin Transport Study First Appraisal ReportNovember 2014.

  • Does Ireland still have a Problem with Whistleblowing?

    Over the past few years, a broad consensus has emerged that in Ireland providing adequate protections for whistleblowing, and whistleblowers, is a lot more difficult to achieve in practice than in theory.

    In many fields, extreme real life consequences for a brave decision to go public with revelations of wrongdoing have been apparent. The protections currently in place do not shield individuals from repercussions in one’s personal and family life, or career. We are talking about losing a job, harassment, unwanted public exposure, grave false allegations and framing, protracted legal challenges, financial difficulties to name but a few. All too often, such individuals are dismissed as ‘rats’. There follow death threats and even the potential for imprisonment. At any level such a decision is a life-changing event. In many cases it is traumatic.

    There are many examples: Garda John Wilson and Maurice McCabe’s ordeals are well recounted in a RTE in a documentary. Back in 2017, banking whistleblower Jonathan Sugarman testified to the Oireachtas that: “Official Ireland has absolutely and completely destroyed the lives of every single whistleblower who has come forward, from whatever walk of life they’ve come.” 

    Many others have come forward to expose misconduct they witness emanating from so-called ‘official Ireland,’ a term that broadly signifies the nexus of the Irish ruling class’s power, across the public and private sector. It is fair to say, as sources have revealed, that there were, and possibly are, many more people who feel unable to go down the whistleblowing path.

    Notwithstanding the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, the law should better regulate whistleblower disclosures and their protection, and encourage people to step forward when they witness wrongdoing.

    Even now in 2021, after much debate and revelations, and with Irish whistleblowing legislation being under the process of amendment in compliance with the EU Directive 2019/1937, it is alleged that a culture of ostracizing whistleblowers persists in the civil service, Garda, as well financial and other corporate institutions.

    If the legislation is there to protect individuals, why then, are some, or many unwilling to proceed? Why is it that after long pondering, and perhaps after seeking confidential advice from a lawyer or union, they find themselves unable to proceed with a disclosure?

    And what can the whistleblower expect to endure after making the brave decision? More to the point, does the proposed new legislation offer adequate protect form the extensive tentacles of ‘official Ireland’?

    I posed these questions to human rights barrister David Langwallner, who was asked by Sinn Féin to help draft a private member’s bill which they propose to introduce to Dáil Éireann by July 31st, 2021.

    Daneiel Idini (DI): David, can I ask you what’s happening these days with regard to whistleblowing in Ireland?

    David Langwallner (DL): What happened was and I’ve got to be a bit circumspect about this. I was approached by a former client of mine who’s a whistleblower, and that client indicated that the Oireachtas was about to introduce, in compliance with EU law, a newly amended protected disclosure legislation to pass in 2021. There is an existing Protected Disclosures Act 2014. But certain deficiencies were pointed out to me by the Sinn Fein party. I had a meeting with them, they’ve asked me to draft a private member’s bill that they propose to introduce by July 31th 2021, first because of perceived and actual deficiencies in the existing whistleblowing bill.

    DI: How long have you been dealing with the issue of whistleblowing concerning Ireland?

    DL: I have represented whistleblowers [in the inquiry into a bank inquiry.] I continue to represent Garda whistleblowers and corporate whistleblowers. I lectured for one semester whistleblowing, at Middlesex University and I have gathered extensive materials.

    DI: You have also written two articles, one in the Village magazine and one in broadsheets on the pitfalls of whistleblowing. And tell me what exactly is wrong with Ireland’s handling of whistleblowing.

    DL: I think a number of things. The first thing is that the new proposed act is seeking to introduce private whistleblower regulation. The real problem in Ireland is state corruption. So you need regulation for whistleblowing and provisions that deal with whistleblowers in the Police; whistleblowers in the Department of Civil Service; whistleblowers within the structure of inquiries; whistleblowers within the structure of the public health system; and indeed the prison service and the present bill does not address that fully.

    DI: Is that because of the fact the whistleblower is forced to refer to the top of the organization that he is trying to blow the whistle on?

    DL: So that is that deficiency, I suppose. But the other deficiencies, documents, and literature suggest that there is no point in having a structure where a whistleblower is subject to the necessity to follow internal procedures before they (feel safe) to go externally.

    The reason for this is that when internal procedures are usually invoked, there’s the risk that bullies, submission, demonization, can ostracize the whistleblower.

    The first recipients of the disclosure are usually the very people who want cover-up in the first place. And in a culture like Ireland’s one, there are very few independent people who take this seriously.

    So a whistleblower has to do a job. He has to be able to circumvent the internal processes and procedures of the corporate or public organization that they’re in.

    And that means a whistleblower has to be allowed to go outside that organization, to the press, for example. But the difficulty that we face in this Irish media context though, is that there is very little investigative press, anymore, who are not controlled by the established parties. The same parties are concealing all the levels of misconduct and wrongdoing.

    DI: So can you tell me in a nutshell in a few minutes exactly what the current legislation covers and if it tackles this “Culture” of antagonism towards whistleblowing?

    DL: Well, the current legislation covers things like criminal wrongdoing, corruption, bad financial administration, miscarriages of justice. It’s extensive to that extent. But the problem is that it doesn’t matter how extensive the coverage is in terms of protection If the culture is not receptive to whistleblowing.

    So, the person I represented to the inquiry into whistleblowing and audit the second day of the case,(the first effective third case,) the police got wind of this and they threatened the breach of the Official Secrets Act. So to intimidate to not go ahead. So even if you’ve got a culture of bullying, harassment, and intimidation, you could also, at the same time have, like the Soviets, a fabulous constitution that protected every right under the sun but it was utterly meaningless in practical terms.

    You could have a whistle-blowing statute that protects everything, but not when organizations such as the Department of Justice, Police, corrupt politicians get involved. I think what we need to do is create a more receptive culture. It means creating an independent ombudsman, allowing for external reportage.

    DI: Can you give me an example of what is the path that he has to follow to effectively become a whistleblower and therefore denounce what he saw?

    DL: Well say, for example, a senior police officer who sees that the police are actively framing people for child sex abuse, for example. The process of complaint in that particular context is that the police officer in question would have to make an internal complaint within the police. And those at the top police force were part of corruption.

    DI: Are you saying that there should be more protections for someone who makes the disclosure directly to an external, independent first recipient. Someone or a body that is not in the organization involved by the whistleblower disclosures?

    DL: There can be no barrier, statutorily, to someone going to an external body or agency or the press, having to have exhausted internal procedures. As they have to go through the hoops of internal procedures, those procedures would try to demonize and diminish them and have a vested interest.

    So you have to go first internally, and then go to an ombudsman, before you go to the press or external body.

    I think in conjunction with the whistleblower allegation, we need to build in a procedure where the whistleblower is almost immediately protected, and that I mean that there must be a party to go to that can give them a income structure if there were suspended from work, so that they don’t have to interact with people who are blowing the whistle on the workplace. The lack of such support is inherent in our culture of compliance, which is so amazing.

    For the purpose of clarification, I had further conversations with David on the last points touched on in the above interview as to the psychological impact that a whistleblower faces. If not properly addressed with, for example, access to therapeutic psychological support, as well as other forms of protection, even more stigmatization may be the result.

    I also discussed with him, as well as with other sources, that currently wish to remain anonymous, the procedures for disclosure that are in place for whistleblowers to use. It’s pretty obvious that internal procedures of disclosures, in some cases, can be painful as well as inefficient for all the reasons discussed above. But are alternatives offered, for example the Garda Ombudsman with regard to complaints about Gardai, allowing for the full protection available under the Act? And is the compensation scheme adequate, or should this include aggravated and exemplary damages?

    Should the protections, and possible compensation, also include redress to family members of whistleblowers, who might have suffered the consequence of this “culture”.

    We will continue to ask these and other questions, but in the meantime, there remains one important question for me to ask which is: has Ireland got any better for whistleblowing, after years of revelations, media coverage, and resignations; or are things pretty much as they always were, if not worse?