John Collison on why Ireland can't do infrastructure

Civil service reform is never on any parties programme for government. Why not?

under existing regulations, a transport project, such as a new road or public transport initiative, may require up to 30 licences, consents and approvals.

In the case of water projects, 21 such processes have been identified, while in the case of electricity infrastructure, 20 regulatory requirements were identified.

Minister Chambers will tell Cabinet colleagues these pre-planning processes are taking up to a year for roads, while for wastewater projects they can take between 1-4 years, and in the development of the national electricity network can take between 1-3 years.

At the bottom of this article about pyrite. Another government screw up that has cost us €Billions.

https://www.thejournal.ie/defective-blocks-scheme-dublin-wexford-6965413-Feb2026/

It's a bit simplistic, as it ignores just how poor this country was up to 1970s, and the author is dead set on presenting a “colonialism” narrative without properly subjecting it to any kind of challenge. “Rich for 30 years” is not the same as “Comfortably off for 150 years”. This is a country that really didn’t start to function properly until the 1980s, and had nothing like an income until 1995 or so. Even the Soviet Bloc countries fared better than we did, as quite a lot of infrastructure was built regardless of cost, because it was paid for in a notional money that you couldn’t use to buy anything with.

We started in 1922 as rich and developed as Denmark. However, a civil war, a religious pogrom (no, they didn’t all leave because of the weather) and some downright stupid economic decisions like starting a trade war with the only nation we sold anything to meant that by the 1930s we were way behind, just in time for war. A bizarre fixation with self-sufficiency in a country that had only a narrow range of raw materials meant we never really recovered. We did actually get money from the Marshall Plan, but 90% of it was in loans, the repayment of which accounted for about 60% of our national debt as late as 1970. We were, by any measure, the poorest country in Western Europe for most of the 20th century, so while the likes of Finland or Austria were slowly building out their infrastructure, we were living hand to mouth, patching up what we had, and hoping that if enough people left the country we wouldn’t have to build anything new. The only policy success we have from those days was the decision to remove financial barriers to education: of the limited options available to them, the governments of the 1950s and 1960s did choose well there.

Of the metrics used for infrastructure, a graph without showing sources is just a pretty picture. It’s not even stated what metrics inform the scores, let alone the scores are calculated: this isn’t economic analysis, it’s cosplay. Picking through the text, it seems to be based on health and… railways? Oh, okay then. I’ll grant her health - we are screwed due to a multitude of causes, plus a long-term health planning model that relied on attrition through emigration and is now struggling badly to keep up with a growing population. But: it’s extremely odd to choose railways and electrified railways rather than, say, kilometres of motorway as a transport metric - one makes Ireland look very underdeveloped, the other makes it look overdeveloped. Now, I love rail, but an island with a dispersed population pattern will never have the kind of rail network that a similar continental European country would, and that has nothing to do with investment. Most tellingly, if you include Health as Infrastructure (which I agree is valid), then why is there no mention of Education in relation to this magical “score”? even more strangely when Ireland is in the leading pack in the OECD in both educational investment and educational attainment. Private education is mentioned as if it’s a common thing, but Ireland actually has the lowest enrolment in private schools in Europe (about 1% for both primary and secondary), and that figure is falling.

It’s not true that Ireland doesn’t need infrastructure to generate wealth: our economy relies on services and specialist manufacturing (medical devices and pharmaceuticals). That kind of economy requires education, telecommunications, transport and healthcare infrastructure. The author also seems to have forgotten that companies have to employ a lot of Irish people before they can say they’re based here for tax purposes, and that means there is an incentive for the government to invest in infrastructure: even if you buy the “corporate colonialism” narrative, then the country’s ability to provide healthy, educated workers at a low wage who can move easily from place to place become essential to the “exploitation” that is apparently going on.

And in the whole article, the word “property” isn’t mentioned once. If you’re looking for a source of why a sandwich costs €12 and people have to spend so long in traffic…