Luas was meant to provide Dublin with a high-quality public transport system that would start running this year. Instead, what the capital city is going to get - 12 months behind schedule and way over budget - is not a system at all, but two free-standing lines with no connection between them.
In the meantime, businesses in the city centre will continue to suffer serious disruption and loss of revenue due to the chaos caused by Luas construction works.
Of course, it would not have been possible to build new rail lines on-street, with no unpleasant effects. However due to the disruption, some businesses have already lost substantial revenues while others face closure, at least temporarily. Yet the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) denies that any of the €100 million it has set aside for contingencies - on top of the latest running estimate of €675 million for the two Luas lines - will be paid out in compensation to those discommoded by their work.
Will the gain from installing Luas be worth the pain now being inflicted? The answer, as Dr Garret FitzGerald suggests in his opinion column today, is in the negative. Even apart from the fact that the two lines do not link up, it is obvious that the route alignment chosen for the Tallaght line was the wrong one.
The RPA cannot be blamed for the fact that the Tallaght and Sandyford lines will be discreet entities. That piece of bad transport planning devolves from a decision taken by the coalition Government in 1998, because ministers could not bring themselves to dedicate road space to public transport along city centre streets. But the agency's board must be called to account for its wrong-headed decision to demolish the ramp at Connolly Station, to create a terminal stop, when it was quite clear that Luas would be extended to serve the rapidly-developing Docklands.
Questions have rightly been raised by Mr Eoin Ryan TD, chairman of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, about the RPA's credibility against the backdrop of its wildly varying estimates for a metro line between St Stephen's Green and Dublin Airport. It is difficult to believe that an initial projected cost of €4.6 billion could so easily be pared back to just €3.2 billion in a matter of months.
And yet even the lower figure is still significantly more per kilometre of tunnel than the cost of the latest metro lines in Madrid. The Government, which will soon decide whether to proceed with this costly project, must also ask itself whether the RPA is really capable of delivering it on time and within budget.