Ireland’s complex regulatory environment is frustrating the delivery of badly needed infrastructure, the National Economic Dialogue (NED) event in Dublin Castle heard yesterday.
In one of the breakout sessions on infrastructure, Dublin Chamber’s Aebhric McGibney made a forceful contribution on the need to streamline regulatory processes to aid the delivery of housing, water and energy projects.
“In many cases, we’ve decided what we want to do, but we’re preventing ourselves from doing it because of the high level of bureaucracy we’ve built into the system,” Mr McGibney later told The Irish Times.
In particular he highlighted the high level of documentation required by different agencies.
“Lots of projects like the Eastern and Midlands Water Supply project have been well assessed and diagnosed for the guts of 20 years” but have still to start.
The project is seen as critical to the delivery of housing in the capital.
“There seems to be a spinning plates process to various projects under the National Development Plan [NDP],” Mr McGibney said.
“In other words the authorities say, look it’s going ahead but not quite yet,” he said, noting that more and more companies do not believe that capital projects under the NDP will happen.
“The range of projects that we’re saying are going ahead when they’re not making any progress is considerable,” he said.
The Small Firms Association (SFA) said a recent survey indicated that 77 per cent of Irish SMEs had not applied for any State contracts in the last two years, reflecting the onerous level of paperwork and bureaucracy involved.
Jeromin Zettelmeyer, director of the Bruegel think tank, meanwhile, warned that “economic nationalism” posed the greatest threat to Ireland’s corporate tax boom.
International tax co-operation and the move to minimum global rate had triggered an additional boom in receipts here as corporations moved their IP to low-tax countries with substance to offer such as Ireland, he said.
But the United States is no longer happy to be undercut in tax terms and may end up deciding to compete with Ireland directly (on tax), posing a risk to the current tax base, he said.
Oisín Coghlan of climate advocacy group Environmental Pillar said most representative groups at the NED “start by saying what they think the Government should spend more money on”.
“This year, the Environmental Pillar’s first advice to Government is what not to spend money on,” he said.
“Don’t spend €8 to €26 billion on the bill we currently face for missing our climate pollution targets,” Mr Coghlan said, citing the potential costs awaiting Ireland if it misses its climate abatement targets, contained in a recent Fiscal Advisory Council report.
“Invest now in improving the quality of life in Ireland rather than waste billions in public money buying carbon credits from other EU states in a few years time,” he said.
“The fiscal council calculated the Government could reduce our climate bill by €14 billion by urgently implementing what’s promised in the Programme for Government: ‘decisive action to radically reduce’ our reliance on expensive, imported fossil fuels,” Mr Coghlan said.
