Chronic inability to build anything big in the State is baked into the system

The chronic inability of the State to get big projects done was on display in Monday’s edition of The Irish Times.

On page one we read how a decades-long failure to invest in water and wastewater infrastructure in the Dublin region has now put the ambitious plan to build 6,000 homes in the former Dublin Industrial Estate in Glasnevin under threat.

Uisce Éireann (otherwise known as Irish Water) had to remind Dublin City Council of this unfortunate point after the local authority published its draft Ballyboggan master plan, which covered the 77-acre site.

Sitting beside it on the front page was a story about how the costs of the yet-to-be-built National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, has increased tenfold to €2 billion during the 10 years since the project was announced.

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Much of the intervening decade was consumed by an increasingly-redundant row about the extent to which octogenarian nuns will impose the will of the Catholic church on a bunch of money-mad hospital consultants. Senior health service figures are credited with having to break the bad news to Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill.

Turn to page three and there is a piece about how the first tower block on the site of the former Irish Glass Bottle factory site in Ringsend, Dublin, may not contain any affordable housing.

Planning permission for the development – which provides for up to 3,800 houses – is contingent on 15 per cent of the apartments being affordable housing. It appears, however, that nobody nailed down the when, where and how much of this.

The council is now in negotiations with Irish developer Lioncor and asset manager Oaktree – which are fronted by the precociously litigious Johnny Ronan. Hard to see that ending well. This particular bit of bad news seems to have been brought to the Government’s attention by the Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin.

A few pages further on we read that the Government’s plans for four large offshore wind farms that are the keystone of its strategy to hit net zero are in disarray. The promoters of one farm – on the Sceirde Rocks off Connemara – have already pulled it amid planning delays. The proximate reason is that the weather in Connemara turned out to be worse than they thought.

The other three projects are now in doubt following the cancellation of similar project off the coast of Yorkshire, northern England, because of rising costs and the risk of delays. The read-across for the Irish projects – which have locked in the price they will get for the energy they will generate at a lower cost than the British project – is not very encouraging.

Given that none of them has got through planning and all are opposed by fringe interests who would happily take their campaigns the whole way to the United Nations if they were let, it must be tempting to just cut and run.

Finally, a few columns over on the same page was a report that the Dublin Metrolink railway project to connect Dublin Airport to the city centre is likely to cost a fifth more than its budget of €9.5 billion and is unlikely to be completed by 2035. This particular wake-up-call was delivered by Seán Sweeney, the New Zealander brought in to run the project.

It’s hard to know exactly what all this proves.

There is no shortage of culprits for this sorry state of affairs of which planning is the favourite. As Sweeney succinctly put it: “The situation in Ireland where pretty well anyone can object to anything and stop it for six months or nine months is not good for Ireland.”

The planning system is, however, only an outworking of a political system that seems to overly promote the concerns of individuals over the common good. Clientelist politics supercharged by an electoral system that fosters intraparty competition for Dáil seats gets the blame for this.

The effect is without a doubt corrosive. A new Oireachtas Committee on Infrastructure has been established, which in theory is meant to address the problem of why we are so bad at delivering large projects.

It is unlikely to add much to the sum of human knowledge, but it will provide a valuable platform for TDs and senators who need to make headlines out of problems rather than solve them if they want to get re-elected. Expect to hear a lot of special pleading on behalf of constituents alongside the scolding of executives.

In many ways, the committee is the absurd culmination of this dysfunctional system. It actually needs failure if it is to function effectively for its members.

There is little mileage in committee hearings where Uisce Éireann executives come in to tell TDs and Senators about the excellent progress being made on upgrading the sewers in north Dublin because the Oireachtas had passed the necessary reforms and had cleared the way for the funding to be provided.

This article was amended on May 14th.