The question now is whether we should establish a new Department of Infrastructure. The Taoiseach says it will be a Fine Gael manifesto pledge. It is not an original idea, however. The Green’s Pippa Hackett had already said the same and she concurred with Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. It was only in the Cabinet reshuffle of December 2022 in an inflation of titles and honours that the Minister for Public Expenditure was refitted as Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform. Now it seems that was not the answer, so the question was changed.
Interminable delay in major and minor infrastructure delivery is a serious economic block, and a sore political issue. Water, transport and energy projects, which feed into rising costs, climate change and housing, are overbudget and behind schedule. The ever-larger State we are mortgaging the future of Generation Rent to build is undermined by administrative and political systems that are unequal to the scale of the tasks facing them. A single bold step to cut through the fug of administrative inertia has political appeal, hence its popularity. In fact, gutting several big departments and reassembling them is administratively a more complicated operation than many of the projects it would be expected to expedite.
Assembling in scale the delivery functions of major transport, water, and energy projects, not to mention the distinct function of housing, would create the most powerful minister since Seán Lemass was minister for supplies during the Emergency. The new minister would have to be a politician of extraordinary capacity. They would require full co-operation, as distinct from faint support from departments being stripped of budgets and responsibility, as well as from the new but diminished ministers appointed to lead them. In an era of coalition-making, it is an open question whether other party leaders would tolerate the outsourcing of so much power elsewhere. The worst of all worlds would be a Department of Infrastructure which takes years to assemble but is several pistons short of being a full engine.
The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, renamed from 2022, succeeded as a department of austerity up to 2016. It succeeds still in one respect, which is the facilitation of the balance of power among the parties in government. The Green’s regret is in not insisting on a rotating turn in one of the big economic twins of Public Expenditure or Finance. Instead, they carved out responsibility for infrastructure delivery in Transport and Energy, but left the enabling mechanisms in other hands in Public Expenditure. Politicians since 2016 have undermined that department’s credibility when it comes to controlling current expenditure. In unprecedented brazenness, the Department of Health and the Health Service Executive completely upended it by describing Budget 2024 as inadequate, and then proceeding as they had planned regardless.
The second of its major functions is management of the public service. Pay deals are now pro forma and have all the tension of a burst balloon. The impetus for public service reform departed with the troika in 2013. That leaves control of capital expenditure, re-emphasised in the change of title in 2020. That control function is at loggerheads with delivery, and is its remaining real and fundamental power. It has control of capital budgets, but no responsibility for what is delivered with them. Its processes are a part but by no means all of the elongated timelines of major capital projects. Planning law, and delays and unpredictability in the courts are another. So is An Bord Pleanála and its lack of skilled people.
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Between identifying a need for example of major transport infrastructure, and getting it through a series of feasibility studies and public consultation, it can take two years to get into the infrastructure guidelines process, changed since 2023 to only encompass projects of more than €200 million.
The sponsoring transport agency must then submit the project to the Department of Transport. It will conduct its own independent external analysis. Then it goes to the major projects advisory group, and the Project Ireland 2040 delivery board which is chaired by Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe. The National Investment Office also makes its input. Then upwards for a first government decision and onwards into the jungle of the planning process, followed probably by judicial appeal. Then the procurement process begins, and on that basis – usually years later – a government decision is made based on final cost, which usually isn’t the final cost.
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Unlike the promise of a Department of Infrastructure, this isn’t one big thing. There are several distinct but overlapping issues, only some of which can be addressed by a new department fit for purpose. The planning Bill, when enacted, may help. An Bord Pleanála is being beefed up. But before Simon Harris drives the JCB into the government apparatus, we need a granular explanation of how processes will improve under a new department and what functions from where will go to it. And there is the issue of cost control, something he will starkly remember from his own inception of the National Children’s Hospital.
Finally, there is the indelicate detail of government formation. After a November election, will parties going into coalition allow the entire Lego set to be a Christmas present for only one minister? We have the big idea, now it’s time for the fine detail.