There’s a scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea list everything the Romans have done for them – sanitation, medicine, education, roads, public health – while insisting the Romans have done nothing. It’s a masterpiece of circular logic disguised as revolutionary fervour.
I mention this because when the MetroLink programme director Sean Sweeney appeared before an Oireachtas committee recently to announce that Ireland doesn’t have enough workers to build MetroLink, that we’ll need 8,000 imported workers plus special housing arrangements, and that there are essentially no Irish firms capable of handling the major contracts, I couldn’t help thinking, what exactly have our handsomely paid infrastructure technocrats ever done for us? Apart from the risk registers, delivery constraint analyses, workforce planning studies, accommodation strategies, and comprehensive recostings based on designs that aren’t finalised yet ... what have they actually delivered?
The answer? A cottage industry in problem identification.
Consider three pronouncements. The Construction Industry Federation insists we have plenty of workers; the problem is pipeline, planning, funding. Engineers Ireland warns desperately that we need a pipeline to avoid losing the workers we apparently have, pointing to 2011 when Metro North was cancelled and skilled workers scattered to Australia, the UK, anywhere that actually built things. Then the MetroLink director tells an Oireachtas committee that Irish construction fundamentally cannot support this project. Three different stories? No. Three people describing the same car crash from different angles.
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What we’re witnessing isn’t a simple labour shortage. It’s something more exquisite. We have systematically destroyed our ability to deliver major infrastructure at scale, then spent 15 years expressing surprise about it. It’s like the Two Ronnies class sketch where everyone knows their place and stays there – except in our version, everyone’s staring at a metro that doesn’t exist while reciting their assigned lines about why it can’t.
We started building Luas in 2001. Between 2009 and 2011, we delivered 13km in three years – momentum, expertise, institutional memory. We were quite good at this. Then 2011’s fiscal panic cancelled Metro North. The skilled workers didn’t wait around. They left. The institutional knowledge evaporated like morning mist. What followed was six years of nothing.
The Metro North cancellation is our Rosetta Stone for understanding Irish infrastructure dysfunction. It’s the perfect case study in false economy. Save a few billion by cancelling, then spend multiples of that rebuilding the capacity you destroyed. It’s like burning down your house to save on heating bills.
When both industry and Engineers Ireland talk about needing a “consistent pipeline,” it’s tempting to dismiss it as self-interested pleading. But here’s the uncomfortable truth. They are completely right.
A pipeline isn’t some neoliberal fantasy. It’s fundamental to institutional capacity. Companies can justify investing in specialised equipment costing tens of millions if there’s another project afterward. Workers commit to training instead of off to Australia. Knowledge transfers naturally between projects. What we do instead is operate on stop-start funding cycles, cancel projects whenever Finance gets nervous, announce shiny new plans every election, watch capacity drain away, express theatrical surprise when we can’t deliver, then repeat.
But wait, there’s more. MetroLink needs 8,000 workers who’ll need housing. The proposed solution? Work with the Land Development Agency to make developments “viable” by committing to occupancy during construction. We’re building housing to accommodate the workers who will build the railway that’s being built partly to support housing development. When accommodating tunnel diggers becomes your residential development strategy, something has gone badly awry.
The current official estimate stands at €9.5 billion, a 2021 base-case figure that TII acknowledges is obsolete, given construction costs have risen 30 per cent since. A figure of €23.4 billion came from the Department of Public Expenditure as a “P95” estimate earlier this year. This is just bureaucratic terminology meaning there’s a 95 per cent confidence the final cost won’t exceed this catastrophic ceiling. A comprehensive recosting arrives early next year, based on designs that won’t be finalised until next month. Translation: we’re flying blind, we know it, we’re telling you we know it. Trust us anyway.
“There are no firms of the scale or expertise in Ireland to run those major contracts. The top line is that the Irish construction industry cannot support the construction of this project and even that is without factoring in the other major infrastructure projects that are in play at the moment as well.” This admission from Sweeney deserves examination. The message is: it’s very difficult, there are many obstacles, good luck everyone. Sweeney’s solution is to bring in workers from abroad, except that we have nowhere for them to live.
The problem for Ireland is that we have too many professional problem-identifiers, and too few professional problem-solvers. Round and round we go, each institution adding another layer to our collective understanding of why nothing can happen, until Irish governance resembles a Kafkaesque story where bureaucracy exists primarily to document its own inadequacy.
This week’s Infrastructure Action Plan promises to accelerate delivery through fast-track approvals and streamlined judicial reviews. It’s precisely the sort of reform that sounds transformative until you realise we’re speeding up planning without building capacity. We’ll approve projects faster, then watch them stall in procurement or sit on desks awaiting specialist staff who don’t exist. It’s like buying a faster car when the problem is you never learned to drive.
We’re not fundamentally incapable. We are selectively incompetent. Wherever there’s consistent pipeline and commercial incentives (motorways, data centres) we manage fine. Wherever there’s political interference and stop-start funding, we produce comprehensive documentation explaining why progress is impossible.
Madrid built 200km in 12 years. We’ve built 42 in 24, with 15-year gaps between extensions. That’s not a resource constraint or planning problem. That’s a choice. A sustained, deliberate, institutionally embedded choice to prioritise political theatre over actual delivery.
[ Can the infrastructure plan tackle Ireland’s packed trains and traffic gridlock?Opens in new window ]
The new plan does one genuinely useful thing. It aligns planning reform, procurement reform and project sequencing into a single framework. That doesn’t deliver infrastructure by itself, but it finally gives the system coherence. With stable funding and disciplined project governance, we might actually see delivery curves bend in the right direction.
When MetroLink finally opens – probably 2037, possibly later, certainly over budget (yes, you heard it here first) – the real test comes the day after the ribbon-cutting. Do we have another project ready to start? Or do we let capacity evaporate again and spend another decade wondering why we can’t build things?
Paul Davis is an associate professor at DCU Business School, where he teaches about procurement, operations management and supply chain strategy. He is a past president of the Irish Institute of Purchasing and Materials Management
