The cost of the Government's ambitious motorway programme has raised serious doubts about whether we can afford to complete it, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor.
Four years ago the National Roads Authority published a little-noticed study outlining what roads we would need to cater for economic development - and growing levels of traffic - over a 25-year period.
In general, the NRA's 1998 National Roads Needs Study advocated upgrading the main national routes to motorways, dual-carriageways or high-quality single-carriageways and building bypasses, where necessary, to relieve congestion in towns along the way.
Just 18 months later, the Government supplanted the NRA's strategy with a plan to build motorways on new alignments to replace the existing roads linking Dublin with Belfast, Cork, Limerick and Galway. A new Dublin-Waterford motorway was added to the list.
No justification was offered for this radical change of direction, other than that we might as well build new motorways seeing as we could afford it. The cost, then estimated at €5.9 billion, was regarded as secondary at the height of the "Celtic Tiger" boom.
The National Development Plan, unveiled with great hoopla in December 1999, aimed to address a long-standing "infrastructure deficit" by providing the State with an inter-urban road network that would facilitate more balanced regional development.
It was envisaged the cost would be roughly in line with the NDP's estimate of €5.9 billion and that the new roads would be completed within the plan period - in other words by the end of 2006. However, neither of these assumptions has turned out to be true.
The running total for completing the NDP programme, which includes the Dublin Port Tunnel and numerous other road schemes, is put at €15.8 billion - more than double the original estimate - and there are fears the eventual bill may exceed €21 billion.
"The increased costs mean that, effectively, the focus will be almost exclusively on delivering the major inter-urban routes to a specification higher than that set out in the Roads Needs Study at the expense of other routes," according to the Department of Finance.
It noted that a review by consultants Fitzpatrick and Associates, published last August, had concluded that the current levels of funding "may not be sufficient even to complete the major inter-urban and Dublin area projects, which the NRA estimates will cost €8.2 billion".
In this light, according to a memo from Mr Adrian Finneran, a senior official in the Department of Finance's public expenditure division, "the question must be asked if this is the most appropriate roads programme to be implementing within likely budgetary allocations".
Addressing what has become known as the "funding gap", Mr Finneran suggested three options:
(1) making further funds available; (2) formally rescheduling projects beyond the 2006 deadline or (3) "reassessing" some projects in terms of their scale. Since current budgetary constraints make the first of these options improbable - indeed, the allocation for roads has already been trimmed in the 2003 Estimates - the likely scenario will involve some combination of rescheduling and down-sizing.
The "funding gap" for the NDP roads programme is currently estimated at €5.4 billion, on top of an "assumed provision" of €1 billion per annum over from 2003 to 2006 inclusive, with a further €2.5 to €3 billion needed to complete the target output after 2006.
Of the €5.4 billion needed for the next four years, the Government has assumed that €1.1 million can be levered from the private sector via public-private partnerships. That can only mean more roads will be tolled to provide a return on private investment.
Given the Fitzpatrick report's finding that more than 100 recent road projects cost 38 per cent higher, on average, than the tender prices, the Department of Finance is seeking ways to limit such over-runs on construction contracts to a maximum of 15 per cent.
Mr Michael Scanlan, assistant secretary, warned in September that the €15.8 billion estimate to complete the NDP programme "will almost certainly increase further, given that the 'holding' estimates for projects will inevitably increase as the projects are progressed".
Accordingly, "it is essential that we get a realistic estimate of the likely completion cost of the programme", he told Mr John Murphy, assistant secretary in charge of the Department of Transport's roads division. So far, there is no indication that such a figure has been produced.