Will the Government be brave enough to implement a set of radical recommendations from the taskforce on infrastructure which is due to report next month? The response will be a clear signal about whether the Coalition parties are capable of implementing the kind of actions the country requires as a matter of urgency.
If they fail to act decisively to eliminate the bottlenecks that have blocked the overdue development of our water, energy and transport infrastructure, the housing crisis will only get worse and centre-ground politics could be discredited for a generation.
The fact that the infrastructure taskforce, chaired by Jack Chambers, contains a wealth of experience in the private and public sectors is a positive sign. One member of the taskforce, Sean O’Driscoll, former chief executive of Glen Dimplex, has publicly committed it to putting forward a range of radical options.
Tánaiste Simon Harris has promised to respond with “big, brave, bold decisions”. If the Coalition lives up to that commitment there is a lot that can be achieved in a short space of time, but political courage will be essential in the face of the inevitable howls of protest.
One of the main blockages to progress has been abuse of court procedure by objectors to almost every major infrastructural project, and plenty of smaller ones as well. The result has been indefinite delays to critical water, energy and transport projects as well as housing development.
The inertia that has gripped decision making in the State for far too long is illustrated by the way a comprehensive set of proposals to remove legal obstacles from the planning system seem to have disappeared into a black hole.
A detailed report on the operation of civil law, chaired by the highly respected former president of the High Court, Peter Kelly, which was published in 2020, put forward a range of straightforward measures to streamline the process of judicial review and end the flood of planning hearings clogging up the courts.
The response to three big, potentially overwhelming events over the past decade and a half, the financial crisis, Brexit and the Covid pandemic, show that the system is capable of decisive action when the need arises
The key proposals were the introduction of a simple piece of legislation to ensure that trivial issues such as typographical errors in planning applications should not be grounds for a judicial review. More importantly it proposed that the courts should not hear a case unless the applicant is able to demonstrate that they have a substantial interest in a planning decision and have a reasonable chance of winning.
The current situation whereby an individual or group can object to a development hundreds of kilometres away from where they live or do business is one of the greatest absurdities of our planning system. The abandonment of Apple’s planned development in Athenry was just one example of the system’s weakness. The Kelly report made a range of other proposals, including tightening the rules on the awarding of costs and the length of time it takes to have cases heard.
In a letter to the then minister for justice, Helen McEntee, introducing his report, Kelly noted how Lytton Strachey in his celebrated short biography of Florence Nightingale quoted her concern that a report of the royal commission into the health of the army “would like so many other royal commissions before and since, turn out to have achieved nothing but the concoction of a very fat blue book on a very high shelf”.
Kelly remarked that not much had changed since Victorian times when it came to implementing reports containing valuable recommendations for reform or innovation. “In an effort to avoid such a result, the review group determined at its first meeting to produce recommendations which would be practical, affordable and capable of implementation with as little fuss as possible.”
Despite producing a report that lived up to that billing, the fate Kelly feared has come to pass. It is just one example of the lethargy which can beset the political and administrative system when it comes to making and implementing big decisions whose need is glaringly obvious.
The response to three big, potentially overwhelming events over the past decade and a half, the financial crisis, Brexit and the Covid pandemic, show that the system is capable of decisive action when the need arises. The same kind of focus, allied to a resolve to face down objectors, will be required when it comes to implementing the expected radical recommendations of the taskforce.
The timidity with which the political system has treated the proposed pipeline from the Shannon to Dublin, to guarantee the future water supply for the capital, illustrates the extent of the issue. The needless delay in constructing a motorway between Cork and Limerick is another example.
The building of Ardnacrusha in the 1920s is often cited as a model of what can be achieved by courageous government action but O’Driscoll has pointed out that much more recently, in the early 1980s, a gas pipeline between the Kinsale field and Dublin was constructed in 18 months. So big projects can be devised and implemented if the political will to drive them exists.
The Coalition needs to be brave and implement radical change for the common good. Failure will have dire consequences for generations to come.
