John Collison on why Ireland can't do infrastructure

Identifying the problems in a system and "doing well in government" are, unfortunately, fairly independent skills.

The USA is far less centrally controlled than either Ireland or the UK, and while states like California face the exact same problems we see the same issues there - declining populations and stagnant economies outside of niche sectors and it is why states like Texas are seeing huge growth and development.

HS2 is not a gold plated vanity project - it is a vital infrastructure project that has faced massive costs from appeasing NIMBYs and bogus environmental concerns. Much like Hinkley Point C which is going to waste over a billion pounds to save a few dozen fish.

CAHSR is not (for the most part) a federally funded project and was never meant to be and the roots of its failure absolutely can not be blamed on the federal government.

no, no environmental group requested this, despite what the Daily Mail says

Environmental groups/bodies don't request anything - they reject plans that don't completely meet their amorphous needs while giving no input on how to meet them. The fiasco at Hinkley Point C demonstrates this perfectly. Having installed their stupid fish disco at absurd costs, Heritage England now say this isn't enough and want them to destroy parts of the coastline to create a saltmarsh that nobody wants. There is 100% an external requirement for these projects to increase biodiversity on a local level - which is an absurd and unachievable requirement which led to this mess. Labour promised to remove this and shamefully backed down. It is absurd requirement on every possible level.

The entire point of Collison's piece is that the Government - the ones actually elected to deal with these matters - are not able to step in and say that spending 1.5B£ to save a few thousand fish a year is beyond stupid. It has a material impact on every other element of life in the UK and we are more than ok with the trade off.

HS2 certainly has an issue with old fashioned Nimbyism that the politicans caved to. But the issues extend far beyond that.

The Federal government has indeed starved CASHR of funds: a $4 billion chunk of federal funding was withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2025 - from the $36 billion Central Valley section. Trust me, a major highway project would not have have had a Republican-controlled USDoT yanking the money out from it just for an overrun - it was an ideologically-driven swipe at a “woke” project.

Yes, Trump bad. This is not why CAHSR is such a mess. They may have made it worse around the edges, but it is not why it is a disaster of a project. California faces the same utterly absurd planning issues that plague the UK and Ireland. It is why there was a massive fight about a proposal to allow mid density housing around transit locations that every local politician is trying to overturn in their area. It is why when an entire area is devastated by a fire, they are making sure no money goes to anyone who dares try to build anything other than giant one off housing.

Off-topic here, but Texas's growth isn’t raw demographics; it is seeing growth because it has set itself up as a haven for tech companies from the coasts, by offering light regulation, cheap energy for datacentres, and a whole ton of tax breaks.

I didn't say it was raw demographics, I said it was because they actually let you build things. Which is why population is increasing and rents are decreasing.

so why pin it on environmental regulation?

You don't think 1.2B£ and multiple delays to pointlessly save some fish is an important element of why Hinckley was delayed? And that is only one among many issues. That is an absurd position to take. It is a massive, massive part of the issue in all of these jurisdictions. It is why the EIA for the Lower Thames Crossing ran to 200,000 pages and part of why the project took 17 years to get approved. Again, the environmental regulation in the UK (and it is worse than Ireland but only a bit) requires not just no local impact, but net local benefit - no matter the overall national benefit. It is why you can't give money to a bat sanctuary instead of wasting 100m£ on a stupid bat tunnel.

HS2 obviously has other issues with the needless tunnelling they are doing in lots of places which is old school Nimbyism but it takes a stark refusal to face reality to acknowledge that huge swathes of environmental regulation today are nothing more than codified nimbyism. I love the environment, but countries are not museum pieces and I care about people more. A cost-benefit analysis needs to be done and under the current framework that is impossible because any cost is deemed too much.

HS2 has a lot of this: when an environmental group makes an observation (and as citizens they are 100% allowed to comment on what’s going to be built), instead of spending some time to address it and close the issue, money and grand promises were thrown at the thing to make it go away quickly.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the issue here. Voluntary environmental groups are frequently annoying but can ultimately be ignored in many cases, the government advisory bodies (and some NGOs) that the govt have abdicated responsibility to directly impact projects. Again, the further delays and utterly ridiculous spending at Hinckley are because Natural England are demanding them - and they didn't demand them up front. They let them waste 700m£ first on the stupid fish disco, then decided it wasn't enough and are demanding they destroy coastline to create salt marshes (something, I would add, the locals absolutely don't want). They made the stupid Bat Tunnel cause they were worried about similar issues with HS2. These bodies never tell them what to do, they just tell them what they have done isn't enough.

These are huge delays and huge costs that come from the Govt completely abdicating the responsibility for these things - which was exactly Collison's point. Natural England don't make any decisions on whether the trade off and costs are worth it as it is not in their remit - it is elected officials who should be saying that the plant is clearly more important than the utterly tiny number of fish this will save and not done any of this mitigation. It is literally a complete waste of over a billion pounds directly and billions more in delayed start up of the plant.

Regarding CAHSR, for the third time I will say that the Federal government pulling funds was not the primary reason for its problems.

And yet it was the primary reason you came up with initially - you said the problem was state funding and a withdrawal of federal funds. It is a state funded project because it is a State project and the State, if it wanted, could override all of the local planning issues as they are the ultimate power. The funding is absolutely, categorically not the problem here. The problem is - once again - they do not want to take control and have abdicated responsibility for it. This still makes it ultimately the government's fault.

The problems here are ones of management

I agree, but you are utterly failing to address the exact failures in management that Collison was outlining. Successive governments here and in the UK and in parts of the US have abdicated responsibility for this management to both courts and NGOs and semi state bodies none of whom ever give any consideration whatsoever to the bigger picture and none of whom are or should be empowered to consider the trade offs and make decisions. They will not always make those decisions correctly (and much of HS2 is evidence of that) but the manner in which they now approach planning by abdicating that responsibility to those with no capability to analyse wholistically and no accountability whatsoever is orders of magnitude worse.

And any attempt to roll back these clearly counterproductive and damaging policies are met with uproar. But they are slowly strangling us.

Fine, I apologise. You didn't state the removal of federal funding as a primary factor. You stated the State funding model as a primary factor which is still wrong.

The issues with CAHSR are nothing to do with funding and everything to do with planning.