From MetroLink to motorways, the National Development Plan (NDP) sets out the most ambitious infrastructure programme in the history of the State. Whether the system around it is ready is another question.
The scale of the NDP is immense. The updated plan, published in July 2025, commits €275.4 billion in public capital investment in the decade to 2035, with €102.4 billion earmarked for the years 2026 to 2030 alone.
Transport alone accounts for €24.3 billion, including MetroLink, the 18.8km line connecting Swords to Charlemont via Dublin Airport, with much of the route running underground, serving key destinations including the Mater hospital, DCU and TCD. Dart+ electrification, the Western Rail Corridor and BusConnects core bus corridors across Dublin, Cork and Galway are also included.
Roads get approximately €9.7 billion, €12.2 billion goes to water and wastewater, with Uisce Éireann the primary recipient, and a further €3.5 billion has been earmarked for ESB Networks and EirGrid to expand the electricity grid.
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Alan Rodgers, managing director, Sisk, says the industry is seeing real traction now, with MetroLink, Water Supply Project – Eastern and Midlands Region (WSP), Greater Dublin Drainage (GDD) and Dart+. “If that continues, we would hope to see all of these in construction by 2030.”
The industry has capacity to take on all these projects, but it’s conditional, says Mark Mulville, head of the School of Surveying and Construction Innovation at TU Dublin. “Larger contractors have a presence around Europe. They’d gone there because there isn’t the pipeline here. It’s different from where we were 10 years ago, when the pipeline was mostly domestic – Irish contractors have diversified quite a lot since then.
“The bigger companies do have capacity, but there are pinch points and challenges around resourcing. They won’t pull crews back from Germany or Scandinavia based on a plan: they need sustained, shovel-ready work.”
On MetroLink, Mulville says Ireland will need the specialisation that international firms can bring. “MetroLink is likely to be a mixture of national and international developers, with certain elements done by specialists.
“In Ireland, a tunnelling opportunity such as MetroLink comes around maybe once every 20 years. It’s too big a gap to invest in the necessary equipment for something that’s not likely to reoccur in an Irish contractor’s working life. In terms of ground works, [there is] no reason why our contractors can’t do it.”
Rodgers also believes international contractors will play a significant role on complex projects such as MetroLink.
Mulville’s concern is about pace. “We need to do proper planning on these projects before we dig a hole. It’s not about planning permission – it’s about properly assessing risk and getting rid of it.”
The Guggenheim museum of modern art in Bilbao, he notes, was delivered on time and under budget because it was properly planned. The Sydney Opera House was delivered 10 years late and 14 times over budget because it was not. “The complex projects that are planned as well as possible in advance are the ones that succeed.”
The concern, he says, is that political pressure on projects such as MetroLink and the housing programme forces a start before that planning is complete. “MetroLink and housing are under so much pressure to start construction that if we do that before we’re ready, it’s a problem.”
The pipeline may be ambitious, but the procurement system designed to deliver it has spent the past decade driving contractors away from public work. Paul Sheridan, director of main contracting and civil engineering services with the Construction Industry Federation (CIF), says almost 70 per cent of contractors are currently doing little or no public works.
The numbers behind that figure are stark. According to the CIF’s analysis of the 2022 Idiro Analytics report, 96 per cent of civil engineering contractors believe public contracts are awarded on lowest price. Most are earning margins of between 2 and 3 per cent on public tenders, with 30 per cent applying zero or negative risk margins. When inflation spikes, ground conditions surprise or supply chains break down, there is nothing left to absorb the shock. Contractors lose money, disputes follow, and projects stall.
Sheridan argues that the root cause is risk transfer. Ireland’s public works contract, he says, was designed to push as much risk as possible on to the contractor, regardless of whether they were best placed to manage it. Ground conditions, utility diversions, errors in background information – all transfer to the private side. The CIF’s position is that this is not even good value for the State: the taxpayer pays a premium for risks that may never materialise, and when they do, the contractor frequently lacks the resources to manage them.
Contractors priced to win rather than to deliver, margins collapsed, and the industry migrated towards private clients, the UK and the Continent.
Reform is under way, Sheridan acknowledges, including price variation mechanisms, early contractor involvement and moves towards quality-based award criteria, but he argues that the pace needs to accelerate significantly if the NDP is to deliver value for taxpayers.
For Rodgers, the ingredients are there: “If visibility and programme certainty can be given as to what is coming down the line and when, our industry is more than capable of building the capacity to deliver.”
Mulville is more measured. “Flagging it is one thing,” he says. “Demonstrating its delivery is the challenge.”
