John Collison on why Ireland can't do infrastructure

spillit67

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123950335#Comment_123950335

They’re advocates, I don’t have a particular issue with it. Same way I don’t with IBEC, the Restaurant Association or even O’Leary getting involved in the national debate. I do think that those who come from a business perspective get far more detailed scrutiny of what they say, which is a function of the soft anti capitalist mindset here.

I think where the Government err strategically is that they fund a lot of NGOs and these charities, all of whom have an overhead and hire people to push their narrative (as is their mandate). It is in the interests of these orgs to slam the Government, so your historically have the farcical situation of Peter McVerry hammering the State on the airwaves, all the while the State were funding the charity in his names balance sheet which increased assets of €100m in just 5 years.

Whilst it has been somewhat in the State’s interest to farm this work out, it has been a disaster for their comms. They have no idea which one is going to hit them daily, and you can have NGOs who do similar things taking a slightly different angle in reporting on a problem or issue they face.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123950725#Comment_123950725

or maybe the states approach of outsourcing critical social functions out to such organisations is fundamentally flawed and is catastrophically failing

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123950603#Comment_123950603

It’s not “short termism”, but rapid change that caught us out. Anyone under 40 really has no idea of where this country has come from in the last 35 years or so. In 1990, the population of Ireland had peaked at 3.5 million, but was declining again as the effects of emigration by the 1970s baby-boom children took hold: we were doing “okay”, but it really was nothing to shout about. Anything planned in that period would have projected a 30 year population of under 4 million people, an unemployment rate of about 10%, and car ownership under 400 vehicles per 1,000 people (that figure was 312 in 1990).

Then the first Celtic Tiger (the real one, the one based on industrial output) happened in the mid-1990s, and the population rose rapidly as emigration fell to near zero, incomes rose, and unemployment effectively disappeared (We had a 4% unemployment rate, which is effectively full employment in any country with unemployment supports). We also experienced something that the nation never had before: people coming here to work. Most critically for road infrastructure, car ownership caught up with the EU average in a very short period (today it’s about 550 vehicles per 1,000 - figures from CSO). That’s why some road projects, like M50, seemed to be “half assed” by 2000: they were designed for a lower population, in a low-performing economy with low per-capita vehicle ownership - a country that had disappeared by 2000.

We actually over-corrected in the 2000s, with over-specified transport infrastructure like M3, M9, M18: even the delays in Luas were about turning it into a full underground, something that wasn’t needed then, certainly not from a tramway.

Then the bubble burst in 2010, the legs went from under the economy, and we lost a decade of infrastructure investment that we still needed just to catch up. Our European peers had longstanding infrastructure in place, a result of decades of prosperity and steady investment: we were trying to catch up on 50 years of neglect at breakneck speed, and we still didn’t get there before the collapse. Now, we’re back to the same catch-up game, but unlike the 1990s, people have forgotten just how far behind we were - and still are - on key infrastructure, and we no longer have the cushion of low population to ease the strain on our cities (This is not an anti-immigration rant; most of the unexpected population growth is from the broken assumption that Irish people wouldn’t stay and raise families in this country)

It’s also not the visible infrastructure we needed, it was the hidden stuff: in our two largest cities, we were still flushing toilets directly into the rivers less than 20 years ago. We also had inadequate social care, special educational provision, and secondary medical care - another thing that’s invisible when you’re healthy and childless. All that had to be fixed too, as well as building the roads and railways that people think of when they hear the word “infrastructure”.

There are, of course, short-term decisions made by politicians, especially when it comes to scheduling of projects, but in infrastructure planning, we have generally developed, and then stuck to, long-term programmes: the National Development Plans were largely carried over from government to government without major changes.

spillit67

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123950733#Comment_123950733

There’s advantages to it. I think longer term AHBs are a much better home for public housing than councils.