Ireland’s infrastructure deficit is not just an issue related to business and competitiveness. It is something that blights the lives of everyone in the country: leaving too few houses to rent or buy; making commutes lengthy and slow; creating queues for hospital services and school places; and leading to a worrying lack of security in energy, water and wastewater services.
And all of this is related. In Ireland’s infrastructural omnishambles, a lack of housing near city centres forces many people to live a long way from where they work. In turn this contributes to commuter chaos. Major ring roads like Dublin’s M50 are already operating above capacity.
Inadequate public transport, in turn, means many commuters have no alternative means of travel. Tales of phantom buses and the failure to open any piece of fixed train or tram line since the cross-city Luas in late 2017 tell their own story. Poor water and energy infrastructure stymie attempts to build houses to help to address all this.
Many of these issues were evident in the latter part of the Celtic Tiger years, when there was already talk of another ring road around Dublin, either west of the M50 or across Dublin Bay through a new tunnel. The crash made all of this seem irrelevant. But the slashing of State investment thereafter is a key reason why Ireland now faces so many pressing infrastructure problems, including a housing crisis. The other ingredient was an economic growth rate post-2015 much stronger than thought possible and a resulting surge in the population.
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After a period in the aftermath of the crash when more people were leaving the State than coming to live here, the trend reversed rapidly in the middle of the last decade as tens of thousands came here to take up employment. Despite housing pressures, this has continued over the past couple of years.
The plan to accelerate the provision of infrastructure published this week is a welcome realisation of the extent of these interconnected issues. That it got such wholehearted Government support, meanwhile, indicates the intense pressure on the Coalition to make progress in fixing things. Ireland’s public finances have not been short of cash in recent years, but delivery has been poor – or in some cases, non-existent.
Significant issues in addressing this, after many years of under-investment, are a lack of project expertise across the public service, a domestic construction sector without adequate capacity and international developers who are not sure whether Ireland is to be taken seriously in this area.
This can only be tackled through years of investment, thus building up a flow of projects and an expertise within the system in how to develop them. Other countries have managed this. Ireland has lost some valuable years. It now needs to get on with it.
