Is Luas going to happen or not? That was the question on everybody's lips at the South Dublin Chamber of Commerce "power breakfast" on Wednesday before the guest of honour, Ms Mary O'Rourke, rose to speak. By the time she sat down, it seemed pretty clear that Luas is definitely going ahead, one way or the other.
The only outstanding question, according to the Minister for Public Enterprise, is whether it would go underground in the city centre. And the independent study of this option by British consultants W.S. Atkins should be finished in April to coincide with the mid-term review of projects being co-financed by Brussels.
The European Commissioner for Regional Affairs, Ms Monika Wulf-Mathies, warned last month that if sufficient progress had not been achieved by next spring to make its completion likely within the agreed time-scale, "all or part of the funds will be reallocated to other projects" covered by the National Development Plan.
Ms Wulf-Mathies takes no prisoners; she has already made that clear by withdrawing EU funds for the controversial Mutton Island sewage treatment plant in Galway Bay. No wonder Mr John Loughrey, Secretary of the Department of Public Enterprise, has been offering to sell "ringside seats" for her meeting today with the Minister.
The commissioner is expected to make it clear to Ms O'Rourke that EU funding for Luas is predicated on the trams running on-street - as recommended by the Dublin Transportation Initiative in 1994 and endorsed by the then Fianna Fail-Labour coalition - and that there is no EU commitment to finance the underground option.
But the Minister does not anticipate Ms Wulf-Mathies threatening to withhold EU funding. "I don't see her threatening anything. I think she's looking for reassurance that I'm about my business and I'm determined to give her that," Ms O'Rourke said in Tallaght. "We will have a very frank discussion, she and I . . . and I'm sure it will be fruitful."
She said she will make clear to the commissioner her "enthusiasm" for Luas and the Government's commitment to proceed with a light rail system "with all possible speed". But the Minister will also explain that she is determined to have all the facts on the underground option before giving the final go-ahead.
Ms O'Rourke's problem - and she knows it - is that the study she has commissioned is coming at "two minutes to midnight" in planning terms. What's more, there is no guarantee that it will be completed by April, in time for the Structural Funds mid-term review; one well-placed source said it might not be completed until June.
In commissioning the latest study, Ms O'Rourke was fulfilling a pre-election manifesto pledge by Fianna Fail - inserted at the behest of Mr Seamus Brennan, then the party's spokesman on Transport and now Government Chief Whip. He is also a TD for Dublin South, which would be one of the main beneficiaries of the Luas project.
But Fianna Fail, which did well throughout Dublin in the June election, must realise that it will not be forgiven if the major public transport project planned for the city is scuppered by continuing delays. It would be political suicide in an urban area, where there is a growing realisation that traffic gridlock cannot be solved by roads alone.
Day after day, horror stories are multiplying about Dublin's self-strangulation by its own traffic. The reason is simple - 1997 will be "the best year ever" for Irish car dealers, as my colleague Andrew Hamilton wrote last week. Nearly 130,000 new cars will be registered by the end of December, adding to the 10 per cent growth in traffic in 1996.
The Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, is under pressure from the car dealers to add further fuel to this sales boom by using his Budget to reduce vehicle registration tax and make the perk of company cars even more attractive. If he yields to this pressure, as the dealers fervently hope, traffic congestion in Dublin will only get worse.
The city would be much better off if Mr McCreevy took a more progressive approach. He could, for example, make company cars less attractive in tax terms, as well as treating free parking spaces in the city centre as a "benefit in kind" and making commuter tickets on public transport tax-deductible to encourage motorists to use it.
The Government must also resist the road lobby's campaign to put Luas underground, thereby preserving space on the streets for more and more cars. What this lobby really wants, however, is to scupper the project entirely, with the funds earmarked for it diverted to major road schemes in Dublin or elsewhere. This cannot be allowed to happen.
Charlie McCreevy is not a "feckless man", as Ms O'Rourke said in Tallaght, yet he agreed to include a capital allocation of £20 million for Luas in the estimates for 1998. This will be regarded as mere window-dressing if the project is postponed indefinitely while CIE is forced back to the drawing boards to design an underground in the city centre.
If, as expected, the W.S. Atkins study puts an alarmingly high price-tag on it - a multiple of the existing £220 million budget - and points out such imponderables as the unknown quantity of tunnelling under the city, the Minister for Finance, as a man of "fiscal rectitude", is likely to blanch at the prospect of digging deep into the Exchequer's coffers.
He will have to do so for the Dublin Port Tunnel, a project which started out at £80 million, rapidly rose to £130 million and is now estimated at £170 million - and that's long before construction work starts. Paying out on the double to put Luas underground inside the canal ring will certainly not appeal to Mr McCreevy.
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, is known primarily as a pragmatist. He is also, as Ms O'Rourke noted in Tallaght, a Dubliner who "is certainly not going to go down as the Taoiseach who did not bring in Luas". That's one reason why she was able to give a "firm, unequivocal commitment" that the project will go ahead, whatever happens.
There are pessimists who say that local authorities have already been asked to find "back-up projects" - all of them major road schemes - to soak up spare EU money if Luas falls at the final fence. They also point out that some of the best people on CIE's design team have left because of the long hiatus caused by commissioning the Atkins study.
But optimists believe the study will be finished in April, that Luas will survive the EU's mid-term review, that the Government will approve the planned on-street project and that the public inquiry will reopen in June. If they are right, construction could get under way before the end of next year and the trams would start running in 2003.