TDs of all parties and none heaved a collective sigh of relief when the Ceann Comhairle, Sean Ó Fearghaíl, commenced the new Dáil session by publicly distancing our elected representatives from the €336,000 cost of the underused bike shelter constructed at Leinster lawn. The Oireachtas Commission, apparently, did not know of, or approve, the monstrous cost.
Responsibility lies elsewhere; the Office of Public Works (OPW) is going to inquire urgently into the decisions that it seems to have made internally.
That situation contrasts with a different Leinster House project that has, we are told, been fully costed and the Oireachtas Commission fully briefed on. It consists of transforming the Oireachtas library reading room, a preserved structure, into a second chamber in which Dáil business could be carried out in a second stream parallel with sittings in the existing Dáil chamber.
The justification for this project was, we were told, the need to make TDs’ hours more “family-friendly”. The aim was to prevent Dáil sittings from being carried on after 8.30pm. They sometimes extend to 10.30pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The Dáil does not normally sit on Mondays and Fridays.
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The Oireachtas Commission has been informed by the OPW that the capital cost of transforming the beautiful library reading room into a second chamber would be €3.5 million (in 2023 prices), and the anticipated extra annual running costs of having parallel Dáil sittings in two chambers would be €1.5 million every year on top of the huge capital cost.
In a recent UK online publication, three authors, Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes, assembled a compelling set of comparative data relating to the question as to why the UK has stagnated economically. They suggest that Britain has fallen far behind similar economies in terms of infrastructure delivery in the areas of housing, transport and energy supply. They argue that everything in Britain costs too much, takes far too long and is far too difficult.
A recent BBC documentary on the truncated but bloated HS2 project made depressing viewing – not just for British viewers, but perhaps for those Irish who may have seen it. Patterns of delay, costs explosions, underestimation of expenditures and deliberate project management concealment have terrible potential Irish echoes.
News that our national children’s hospital project will not now be opened for patients until 2026 at the earliest raises profound questions about our collective political capacity to control delivery and costs on big infrastructural projects. You have to pinch yourself to remember that the work on the hospital commenced at its Rialto site 10 years ago. The original cost was €650 million in 2016 prices. By February 2019, the cost had ballooned to at least €1.7 billion. And it is now heading well north of €2.25 billion. And we are told that a legal dispute is likely with the contractors, BAM. Presumably that would happen behind closed doors in an arbitration process.
It is embarrassing to recall that the then taoiseach Micheál Martin and Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly visited the site in 2022 to plant the first tree in the hospital garden, noting that the building’s facade was 80 per cent complete. That was four years ahead of what is now the projected opening date. A year later, in late 2023, it was claimed that the building would be complete by October 2024, about now.
Consider the fate of Ireland’s most recently authorised underground railway project, the Dart underground project connecting Heuston station and Pearse Station via Christ Church and the city centre. The National Transport Authority actually obtained a railway order from An Bord Pleanála giving the green light for its construction in 2011.
The then minister for transport, Paschal Donohoe, pointed out that the €4 billion project would have to be completed by a public-private partnership, and he had to decide on the project by September 2015, when the railway order would expire.
The project was still firmly on the NTA’s agenda in 2016, but was dropped in 2018 (having cost the bones of €180 million to design), to make way for the north-south Metrolink for which the NTA is currently seeking a railway order from An Bord Pleanála. The cost of Metrolink is projected at €12 billion, but the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee has already voiced its fear that the eventual cost could be more than €20 billion – if it is ever built.
Urban cyclists must use bike stand facilities that are open to the elements – not elaborate bus shelter clones costing €336,000 for 18 dry saddles, depending on wind direction. Wasting €3.5 million in capital cost and €1.5 million annually thereafter to reduce the Dáil’s sitting hours by two hours on two of its three day-week sitting days is but a symptom of a far greater Irish governmental malaise.
Like Britain, we suffer from advanced administrative sclerosis, but we are in a state of complete political denial.