[article] €14 billion hole in national rail and road plan, bombshell Cabinet memo reveals

marno21

https://extra.ie/2023/09/30/news/irish-news/national-rail-road-plan

Mail on Sunday reporting that there's a massive hole in the "national rail and road plan".

Although it's light on detail, from what we've seen re: rail projects, it seems much more of an issue for them. MetroLink is now priced at 9.5bn, and DART+ West alone is now priced at 1bn, with the combined 4 DART projects being priced at 2bn in the 2018 plan.

IMO, there's not too much of an issue for the roads programme for a number of reasons

1. Of the 31 projects listed in the NDP, three of them have got to just planning submission, meaning 28 are still at the pre-ABP stage. This means at least 4 years away from construction at the absolute earliest, meaning they are unlikely to require funding in the near term
2. Of the projects which could feasibly commence construction between now and late 2026 (Adare, M28, Ardee, Galway Ring Road), there is more than enough funding to cover these in the overall 2021-2030 funding profile.

A bigger issue here is there is a significant ramp up in funding for roads capital projects (as of now it's forecast that 1.1bn is available between 2021 and 2025 and 4bn between 2026 and 2030) after 2025 (conveniently), however there aren't near enough projects with planning permission to allow such funding to be spent.

KrisW1001

I suspect there are. All those small projects on the secondary network add up.