Why is our capacity to deliver infrastructure projects worse now than it was in the 19th century?

Last week, Kevin O’Sullivan wrote here about the risk that Ireland might find itself a victim of heatwaves, droughts and forest fires. Since I spent this month in Co Roscommon’s Shannon side, previous expert predictions that Ireland was more likely to have wetter, cloudier, if slightly warmer summers seemed a little more credible to me.
Predictions that climate change might increasingly result in continental tourists seeking cooler, cloudier and rainier refuge in places such as Ireland abound in the media. Whether that is borne out in future, we shall see. But, in the meantime, there are some contingencies for which we must prepare in terms of infrastructure.
Preparing for contingencies is why, 13 years ago, Dublin City Council, which was then responsible for water supply in the capital, published a plan to supply up to 350 million litres per day to Dublin from Lough Derg via a pipeline to be constructed.
So, what we are talking about is not exactly massive in terms of daily volume.
Irish Water, the then-newly created national water utility, took over the project in 2016 and came up with a pipeline route from Parteen, south of Lough Derg, to Dublin serving anticipated water needs for the east Leinster area. The proposed abstraction represents 2 per cent of the Shannon throughflow at Parteen. The water would be pumped to a point near Cloughjordan in Tipperary and would flow by gravity to the Greater Dublin Area. O’Sullivan wrote in 2018 that planning permission for the project was being applied for.
Critics said that it was unnecessary as Dublin city was in 2017 losing 45 per cent of its water supply through mains leakage every day, while most cities managed a leakage rate of less than 15 per cent, according to a 2017 report from KPMG. Uisce Éireann, the new name for Irish Water, reduced mains leakage to 37 per cent in 2023 and plans to get that figure down to 25 per cent nationally and to 20 per cent in Dublin by 2030.
The latest position is that the Government finally decided in June 2024 to authorise the Parteen-Dublin scheme. The present estimated cost-range for the project is between €4.5 and €6 billion and the project would have to go through the infrastructural planning process in 2025, and the construction time is estimated to be four to five years.
The bottom line is that what was planned as early as 2011 to 2016 is being given the green light now and will be completed, if all goes well, by 2030. The cost of the project will presumably be multiples of the original Uisce Éireann proposal. In 2016, Irish Water estimated a cost “between €700 million and €900 million” and completion by 2024.
[ How concerned should we be about our ‘at risk’ public water supplies?Opens in new window ]
Contrast that with the construction in 1847 of the Dublin-Cork mainline railway. It received parliamentary assent in 1844 and reached Carlow and Cashel in 1846. Assent to extend the line to Cork was received in 1845 and the line reached a temporary terminus at Blackpool outside Cork city centre in 1847. That massive project was largely done without anything more than pick, shovel and manual labour. (Railway buffs will rush to point out that the last few miles to Ceannt station in Cork city centre, involving the digging of a tunnel, was not completed until 1855.)
Assuming, as I do, that Irish Water’s 2016 predictions of water needs in east Leinster and Dublin require the construction of the Shannon-Dublin pipeline, and even assuming that predictions of Irish drought risks are justified, how is it that our planning, approval and construction of major national infrastructure projects always takes so very long compared with the early Victorian Great Southern railway to Cork?
Would we be better reverting to a 19th-century procedure whereby major infrastructural projects receive parliamentary approval and are implemented in quick order? Does everything have to be done through the current planning-board process, including offshore wind farms and projects such as Metrolink?
A central issue for nearly all public and private infrastructure, including addressing the housing crisis, is the question of compulsory purchase. We need to revolutionise the system of compulsory purchase, to increase supply of land, both greenfield or brownfield, for housing. We badly need efficient and effective compulsory purchases in pursuit of that aim.
The same applies for all forms of public infrastructure. Compulsory purchase also lies at the heart of the whole issue of positive urban planning (as distinguished from the permissive zoning regime now masquerading as planning law).
It is tragic that the legislative proposals of the Law Reform Commission on compulsory purchase published in 2023 were left on the shelf while other legislation on planning and other major infrastructural projects are slowly enacted and progressed.
In pursuit of value for money and speed, the shareholders of the Great Southern railway to Cork did a far better job than administrative Ireland can manage these days.