Winners of the recent Navan Line tender are due to be officially announced in the short term future, two main options to be invesitgated, the old D&M alignment or a diverision to bring it closer to Dunshaughlin.
In fairness to the NTA, it's not for lack of interest in building railways. Indeed Marcello the head of rail is very eager to push projects through and get shovels in the ground. Indeed he has butted heads with IÉ over they wanting to run services to suit the infrastructure while he wants IÉ to be looking to put the infrastructure in to support the desired services. The NTA of old was more interested in buses but since the change in personal there's a big change coming from their side of the field.
It is the departments of finance and public expenditure that are pumping the breaks on projects and requesting increasing levels of reports to show financial benefits as the OPW debacale has spooked the civil service into being afraid of signing off on infrastructure. Cycle lanes are smaller and nimble projects that don't have to go through the same level of regulatorly financial red tape. It's also should be noted that rail infrastructure investment is new again to the island and the industry has taken time to get to grips with delivering these projects but there's been a lot of background enabling works going on that are starting to come on stream which will speed up other projects.