The news that the official opening of the National Children’s Hospital will be further delayed will not come as a surprise to anyone who has been observing the tortuous progress of this elephantine project.
Completion of the hospital, a vital piece of the State’s health infrastructure, has been delayed again until at least September, with patients now not expected to be treated there until June 2026 at the earliest. The facility has become emblematic of the apparent impossibility of delivering major capital projects on time and on budget.
Concern is intensified by the fact that the Government is committed to the most extensive programme of infrastructure investment in the State’s history.The newly-appointed director of MetroLink, Sean Sweeney, has already said the underground rail line from Dublin Airport to the south-central city could cost 20 per cent more than its projected budget of ¤9.5 billion.
Sweeney brings a welcome international perspective to the question of why large projects appear doomed to suffer cost overruns, delays or both. He has bluntly said MetroLink’s planned completion date of 2035 will probably not be met and that there will be “grievous” disruption to people’s lives during its construction.
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Such frankness is welcome. Stories such as that of the truncated HSS train line in the UK, the aborted high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco or the decades it took to complete Berlin’s Brandenburg airport, have all given fuel to accusations that the modern administrative state, and democratic systems generally, are mired in over-regulation, excessive litigation and a failure of public administration.
Whether fair or not, these critiques carry a particular resonance in Ireland, where a combination of decades of under-investment and a sharp rise in population is already putting intolerable pressure on creaking infrastructure.
It remains to be seen whether the reform of planning legislation introduced by the last government will improve the situation, although many observers are sceptical. A report on infrastructure last week from Ibec, the business lobby, had a range of sensible recommendations on speeding up delivery, as well as calling for a review to ensure the wider public good takes priority in planning. And planning is not the only issue. The chair of the new Oireachtas Committee on Infrastructure has said it will examine the practice of “lowballing” on public capital projects, where estimates of cost are pitched low but the price escalates afterwards.
With the benefit of Apple’s tax payment and significant resources in the exchequer, the Government has an opportunity to make progress on transformational investments. But it can’t just continue doing the same things and hoping for a different result.
