Transport projects face delays if ‘huge hole’ in budgets not filled - NTA

Major transport projects are facing even longer delays if the “huge hole” in infrastructure budgets is not filled by the Government, National Transport Authority (NTA) chief executive Anne Graham has said.

The value of funding set aside through the National Development Plan and transport investment programmes in the past two-three years had plummeted due to inflation, Ms Graham told an event in Dublin hosted by employers’ lobby Ibec on Tuesday.

“The big challenge for Ireland is the return on the investment now. Inflation has taken a huge hole out of the value of what the Government has put aside for infrastructure,” she said.

The largest transport projects planned for the capital in decades are still in the planning process, including the BusConnects infrastructure programme, while the Metrolink, the largely underground rail line from Swords to the city centre via Dublin Airport, is already eight years behind its original schedule, and is not projected to start operations before 2035.

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The active travel programme, which funds the development of cycling and walking infrastructure, had seen the value of its budget of €290 million reduce in real terms by more than one-third to about €190 million, Ms Graham said.

“If that is not rectified some way by an increase in investment, it is going to slow down the delivery even more, because there is less money to deliver. So that is something I do think will be challenging in the review of the National Development Plan.”

The challenges to infrastructure funding were coming at a time of increasing demand for public transport, she said.

“We are way beyond our pre-Covid figures in terms of people travelling, that has put us under pressure to deliver more capacity in the system a lot quicker. Building that capacity quicker is something we need to do to address demand,” she said.

“In Dublin we are 10 per cent above 2019 [public transport demand] levels, outside Dublin its 20-30 per cent higher demand.”

New rural services introduced since the pandemic were also showing “huge demand”, Ms Graham said.

“The economy and the shortage of drivers are both putting a strain on our delivery. We are seeing more public transport use at weekends and evenings. We have seen a huge growth in weekend travel, and in terms of delivering more demand on a Saturday or Sunday, it can be challenging to get drivers.”

Ibec chief executive Danny McCoy said it was essential the Government continued to invest in infrastructure and resisted the calls to set aside a “lump of money” to cushion future economic shocks.

“There’s this knee jerk reaction for a rainy-day fund despite the scorchio conditions of an overheating economy,” he said.

There was, he said, a “fallacy” that having “a big lump of money” will save the country in the future. He said “that doesn’t actually work” and the money would be better used to keep the “infrastructure flowing”.