No substitute for experience when it comes to delivering infrastructure

Whatever the complexion of the next government, implementing a big programme of infrastructural investment will be a key challenge. We need more houses, water and sewerage pipes, electricity capacity, public transport, and hospitals.
Other countries have found this tough to do, and had overruns in cost and time. We are not alone.
The most successful examples have been where big projects are not one-offs, but form part of a programme. Learning by doing, and economies of scale, drive efficiencies.
In Ireland we successfully built hundreds of labourers’ cottages in the 19th century, and tens of thousands of local authority homes in the 20th. We built loads of rural schools to standard designs. When Beaumont Hospital was under consideration, it was decided to copy the design of Cork University Hospital at Wilton, to speed up the process.
In projects on a bigger scale, the large number of nuclear electricity plants built by France in the 1970s and 1980s meant that the unit costs over this investment programme fell with each new unit. However, 40 years on, the first nuclear plants of the current era that are being built in France and Finland are subject to large cost and time overruns. With a new design, and an inexperienced team, they have to learn on the job.
Germany’s recent record on big projects has been marked by a lack of the once legendary German efficiency. Berlin’s Brandenburg airport finally opened in 2020, 14 years after construction began, and 29 years after official planning had begun. An €80 million concert hall in Hamburg ended up costing €900 million. Today, the failure to drive through a significant strengthening of Germany’s North-South electricity grid is costing its economy.
At a Berlin economics conference I attended some years ago, German bankers publicly bemoaned Germany’s infrastructure failures and questioned why Germany could not be more like Spain in terms of delivery. This was somewhat ironic, given how the same bankers had castigated Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain after the economic crash, for their inability to manage finances.
There are two key aspects of Spain’s success. First, their planning system puts much more emphasis on the public good over private interests. Second, there is a programmed approach — having learned the hard way with the first project, the same team keeps on delivering subsequent similar projects.
This means Spain has built, and continues to build, new metro and high-speed rail lines efficiently. However, an advantage Spain also has is that there are many large projects, and so fewer slow-to-build one-offs.
Here, the first Luas lines were slow to complete, however the Green Line extension to Broombridge was built successfully by the same project management team which had acquired the expertise to deliver it efficiently.
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The national children’s hospital was a brand new design, and on a scale not seen before, which has exacerbated the well-known teething problems in getting it done. There’s a lot to be said for using fairly recent but tried-and-tested designs that avoid the risks and delays of being cutting-edge, without being obsolete.
There is also merit in having the same management team deliver the future hospitals we need, so that this very hard-won experience isn’t lost.
While Dublin’s metro has been in planning for 20 years, there’s been no action so far. However, the team who actually start building it should be immediately tasked with preparing to construct a second line, which would likely be done more efficiently than the first.
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Inexperience with huge projects is only part of our delivery problem. The planning and regulation bottlenecks give rise to serious sclerosis here (as in Germany). While the new 800-page Planning Act may improve things, I worry that its inherent complexity will dog us for years. I suspect it has not gone far enough to prioritise the public good over more minor issues, when we are in a housing and climate emergency.
A new department of infrastructure has been proposed, but this isn’t a magic bullet. Civil servants don’t have relevant expertise in project management, engineering, or construction. That’s more likely to be found in specialised State agencies, like the ESB or Transport Infrastructure Ireland.
Furthermore, new departments take time to set up and years to bed in. Moving climate policy from the then Department of Environment to the Energy Department in 2016 meant a loss of expertise, as key officials didn’t transfer. It has taken years for the new configuration to fully find its feet.
Likewise, any new department of infrastructure could take a long time to get up to speed.