In any discussion of where Ireland finds itself, the first thing to note is how much it has already changed.
Since I was born in 1990, the Republic’s population has grown from 3.5 million to 5.5 million, a faster growth rate than any other EU member state except tiny Malta and Luxembourg. The number of people in employment has increased 137 per cent in that time. And the rate of growth keeps accelerating. Net migration since 2021 is 88 per cent higher than in the previous three years.
This growth has been a blessing in many ways, but it comes with problems. Ireland can’t build quickly enough to keep pace with the demand to live, work and invest in the country. It has Europe’s second-fewest homes per person. Dublin’s water network is going to reach its limits in the next three years, which will limit future housing construction. Ireland’s household electricity prices are the highest in Europe. It has 41 per cent fewer trains, roads and other transport infrastructure per capita than high-income European countries. And it has the lowest proportion of electrified rail of any EU member state.
To put it simply: we have not built enough homes or infrastructure or sufficiently developed our energy system to keep up with the radical population growth we’ve seen in my lifetime.
RM Block
Our shortage of roads, railways, sewers, homes and pylons creates social problems. For the want of homes and infrastructure, grandchildren are forced to live far from their grandparents. Students can’t live near their university and so lose out on student life. Many people commute three hours a day. Others sleep on relatives’ couches or on the street. Life milestones such as marriage and family are delayed. Cities crowd out artists and lose their bohemian buzz. The stress frays Ireland’s social fabric and drives political polarisation.
Despite Ireland’s population growth, it remains one of the least densely populated countries in western Europe. It has talent and money. We are a high-trust society. What’s stopping Ireland from building what it needs to have the highest living standards in the world?
Ireland’s shortages of housing and infrastructure didn’t come from nowhere. Here are some specific projects Ireland fumbled: The Grid West transmission project, linking Dublin to the windy west, was shelved in 2017. Proposed nearly 30 years ago, the Water Supply Project, linking Dublin to the Shannon, still hasn’t entered planning. The Greater Dublin Drainage Project has entered its second judicial review, 20 years after it was first proposed. The Dart+ Tunnel, which would have facilitated hundreds of thousands of homes west of Dublin, was shelved in 2021.
The North-South interconnector has been in limbo for 23 years. Intel, Ireland’s flagship manufacturing tenant, picked Germany over Leixlip, Co Kildare, in part because of concerns over planning and electricity supply. The pre-construction phase for motorway projects has extended to eight years. MetroLink has been in the planning for 25 years. Ten years into the housing shortage, the backlog has only grown.
Why can’t Ireland just do things?
It’s not for want of money. For the past 10 years at least, we have had plenty of money. To be sure, investment did fall after the bailout, resulting in important projects being shelved, and a slow ramp-up thereafter. But in the grand scheme of the past 30 years, Ireland has been able to afford the projects it has needed.
NIMBYs are a popular target. And they deserve our scorn. Uniquely in developed countries, our system makes it easy for them by giving anyone legal standing to object to development. Unrelated third-party objectors have successfully blocked many thousands of homes and hundreds of megawatts of clean energy.
But local opposition to development is not, by itself, the main bottleneck for projects in Ireland. If it were, we’d expect to see big protests against new projects or intense debate in council chambers. But we don’t. Instead, restrictions in the form of planning policies emerge from a mysterious process involving officials from local authorities, the Department of Housing and the Office of the Planning Regulator. This happens far from the public eye.
The national debate over seomraí was one of the rare occasions in which a specific planning measure was debated publicly, and the Irish public was remarkably supportive of allowing this kind of development. That tells us something about who has control the rest of the time.
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Is a lack of political will to blame? There’s something to this. The state’s responses to Covid and Brexit show it has a higher gear than we usually use. But Irish politicians are not out of touch with the electorate. They know all about the housing and infrastructure shortages. They know they’re on the hook. The building of homes has been in the government’s top three policy priorities for at least five years. In that time money, attention and political capital have been lavished on housing and infrastructure. But the problems remain stubbornly unsolved. This suggests there’s something else going on.
The answer is that our processes to decide on what gets built and where have broken down. Those decisions are now made by bodies that do not, and cannot, think holistically about the tasks we have set them.
It’s easy to see how we got here. The generation of leaders in the 1980s and 1990s have a lot to answer for. The legacy of the likes of Charlie Haughey, Bertie Ahern and Ray Burke was to permanently damage the public’s trust in politicians.
In Haughey’s heyday, Irish politicians had a lot of power. Ministers could wave through big projects, micromanage their departments, directly appoint allies to big jobs, set budgets as they saw fit, chat freely with lobbyists, procure what they wanted and from whom they wanted it, control local councils, and even appoint judges.
This was a system that was capable of doing new things quickly. Haughey brought about the IFSC and Temple Bar in one term. In 2006, we built 93,419 homes. Between 2000 and 2015, we built 895km of motorway, Dublin Airport’s Terminal Two, the Jack Lynch tunnel and the Port Tunnel.
But it was also, as we know all too well, a system open to abuse. In reaction to the scandals of the 1990s and 2000, huge amounts of discretionary power was confiscated from politicians and given to officials, regulators and agencies. The 1997 Public Service Management Act; 2003 abolition of the dual mandate; the 2012 Fiscal Responsibility Act, the 2013 Office of Government Procurement, the 2014 establishment of State Boards. The Standards in Public Office Act and Freedom of Information Act policed interactions between citizens and the government. These acts curtailed politicians’ power to gather information, spend money and control the arms of government.
A crackdown on corruption is one thing. But that’s not the only thing going on here. In the past 25 years there’s been a proliferation of regulators, departments, agencies and NGOs. Since 2000 we’ve created 303 new government agencies, quangos or departments, compared to 74 in the prior 25 years. We got more new government agencies, and at a faster rate, than we got episodes of Top Gear.
One argument for independent agencies is that the work at hand is technical and politicians are liable to screw it up. Another is that they need to operate at arms length to guarantee the rule of law and avoid conflicts of interest, like the Standards In Public Office Commission. Another is that long-lived assets require multiyear oversight, as with the National Transport Authority. Another is that politicians need their hands tied to the mast when it comes to annual budgeting, which justifies the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council.
We should not leave the state on autopilot, with difficult trade-offs being avoided and chronic problems unfixed
— John Collison
These are all fine arguments. But the reality is that power is zero sum, and each agency is its own island of political power. Some of them are controlled by their parent departments in the Civil Service. Others are answerable only to their boards. Each new one has the effect of diminishing the power of ministers to get things done.
This phenomenon is not just Irish. Around the developed world, power has shifted from politicians to officials. The book Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman divided US political history into the period before 1970 and the period after. The period before 1970 it said was focused on building capacity, the period afterwards on constraining capacity: “If progressivism had once been focused on building up centralized institutions, the new goal was to tear them down.”
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This constrained state – not only Ireland, but the USA, France, the UK and more – struggles to build. The cost to build a megawatt of nuclear power in France has gone up 245 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms since 1978. The real cost to build a kilometre of highway in the US rose 400 per cent between the 1960s and 1980s. Houses take 79 per cent longer to build today in the US than they did in 1978. In the UK, a project to build a new tunnel under the river Thames had to produce a planning application that was 360,000 pages long and cost £297 million to produce. The entire Dartford Crossing bridge a few miles west of it was, of course, built for less money in the 1980s.
There are four reasons it’s a bad idea to leave the running of the country to agencies and officials. (Indeed, there are probably more!)
The first reason is that these agencies aren’t directly accountable to the public. This presents a problem regardless of whether they’re good or bad. Agencies should be accountable to the public that pays their salaries. In Ireland, the HSE has clashed with the health minister over its inability to control spending. The Road Safety Authority has been in continual conflict with the minister for transport. A 2014 report enhancing accountability within this newly empowered civil service was killed with incredible speed.
The second is that the agencies have values and goals of their own, and these values are sometimes out of step with the rest of the country. The NTA has decided not to expand road capacity in Dublin. The Department of Housing has decided to intentionally depopulate the east of the country. An Coimisiún Pleanála has blocked the demolition of old concrete ramps at Dublin Airport. Two hundred and twenty eight homes were blocked in Killarney because they would interrupt the commute of a roost of horseshoe bats. Who signed up for this?
Some agencies’ decisions don’t even further their own stated goals. In August, An Coimisiún Pleanála ruled that the old Citibank building on the Liffey’s North Quays couldn’t be knocked down and redeveloped. Their reason: the construction of a new building would result in the emission of carbon. So instead, new development will happen on green fields, far from existing transport links and city cores, and result in more commuting and more carbon emissions.
The third problem with government-by-agency is that the agencies can’t make trade-offs. If the pursuit of their goal blocks something else important – well, that’s not within their remit. So we have the state-funded An Taisce blocking the Galway ring road, the M3 motorway and the Shannon LNG scheme. We have officials at Fingal County Council throttling flights out of Dublin Airport. Inland Fisheries Ireland blocks flood remediation works. The Heritage Council is blocking the demolition of a wall for the N2 bypass. And then the combinatorial complexity between overlapping state bodies creates logjam. Irish Water, Waterways Ireland, ESB, EirGrid, and the EPA each have jurisdiction over different bits of the Shannon. The Department of Housing, local authorities, An Coimisiún Pleanála, the Office of the Planning Regulator, the Land Development Agency and the Housing Agency have overlapping responsibility for parts of the housing system.
I have found that leadership often doesn’t mean setting grand, sweeping plans but instead resolving nuanced trade-offs between competing priorities. By creating a multitude of agencies each with specific remits, we’ve created a system that’s institutionally incapable of making trade-offs.
The last problem with all this delegation is it makes people disillusioned about politics. When politicians can’t follow through on their promises, no matter which of them is in charge, voters lose faith in the system altogether. Young people start to say they don’t need to vote because it won’t make a difference, and we start to prove them right.
Like any intervention, the first thing that needs to happen is we need to admit to the problem. Ireland’s track record when it comes to building is simply not good enough for a country as rich and sparsely occupied as we are. It’s not okay for our society to forget the basics of running a country: we’ve forgotten how to build sufficient housing for our population, we’ve forgotten how to sensibly organise population growth, we’ve forgotten how to attract foreign manufacturers, and we’ve forgotten how to build infrastructure to support our population. These are things we once did and – for all intents and purposes – can do no longer. We’re not meant to be going backwards.
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We need to reverse the continued reassignment of power in Ireland – and many countries around the world – from elected politicians to the Civil Service and agencies. We should not leave the state on autopilot, with difficult trade-offs being avoided and chronic problems unfixed. We should not conflate constrained power with good governance.
We should shift from looking at our agencies’ missions (which are soothing and well written) to scrutinising their real-world impact. We should notice that environmental goals have created stasis, planning has turned into the tyranny of the minority veto, and proactive city design has simply ceased. Process has been allowed to take precedence over outcomes.
I notice a common meme in Irish political discourse that our politics and government are corrupt. They are not. Ireland tends to come out near the very top of global anti-corruption measures, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. It isn’t the 1980s any more. We can trust our leaders with more power and they should feel emboldened to use it to deliver for their citizens. We shouldn’t keep trying to hamstring them even more.
How can our elected leaders take back the steering wheel? It’s not easy. Power is widely dispersed across a sprawling administrative apparatus. But a determined government has the legal, political and moral authority to do it.
Our Government should draw inspiration from Mark Carney. Canada’s prime minister is taking control over domains such as infrastructure with the new Building Canada Act, which grants the cabinet the power to give big infrastructure projects every permit, licence or approval they might require to go forward.
Carney is not the only leader to recently reassert control over their country’s system. The Netherlands, New Zealand and Germany have each in recent years passed laws to accelerate consents and reduce consultation for nationally important infrastructure projects.
Another approach is to find areas to curtail agency discretion (which can create slowness and uncertainty) and replace it with clarity through sensible, up-to-date rules. Our planning system would be a good place for this. Local authority development plans run to thousands of pages. In these plans, you will not find specific rules. Instead you’ll find a soup of dozens of goals and targets. Like Mass before Vatican II, interpretation of these texts is the domain of individual planning officers. The planning system does not need to work like this. Other European countries’ planning rules are much more specific, which makes planning faster and less risky.
My last suggestion would simply be that our leaders must step up and lead. Timidity won’t get us out of our current jam. Our leaders have more power than they currently use. The housing minister has the authority to tell councils to make future development plans more specific. The Oireachtas can directly issue planning permission for major projects, provided it scrutinises environmental impacts in the process. Progress Ireland (an independent think tank which I have backed) has published 25 ready-baked ideas for how to get much more housing built in this current term of this Government.
When I was growing up, Bulmers ads used the slogan “Nothing Added But Time”. As a result of how we got here, with past excesses and Ray Burke and ghost estates, we’ve ended up with a system of government that slowly ferments projects rather than energetically gets them done. Let’s analyse not just specific projects but the broader system and how it delivers for us. And let’s fix the parts that add nothing but time.
Irish entrepreneur John Collison is cofounder and president of Stripe
