By deciding to move on with Metrolink, the Government has nailed its colours to the mast of a project intended to blot out bad infrastructure procurement memories.

There was no surprise in Wednesday’s cabinet decision – and this lack of surprise is welcome. One year ago, I joined hundreds of representatives from contractors interested in bidding to build Dublin’s future metro at the Helix in DCU. We heard the country’s top officials give assurances that the project would now go ahead no matter what.

“The funding is now in place,” Taoiseach Micheál Martin said at the time, while Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Simon Harris promised “certainty of funding”. The world’s largest civil engineering and railway companies were hooked. From that point on, there was no going back.

The cost range accepted by the Government on Wednesday, between €14.44 billion and €17.49 billion, is no surprise either. At the start of this year, Transport Infrastructure Ireland began to issue procurement notices for the competition stage of procuring Metrolink. By the end of June, they covered nearly all the work packages expected to go out to tender after last week’s cabinet green light, with estimated costs exceeding €17 billion.

This time last year, Martin said: “It is not just another infrastructure project. It is a truly transformative investment for the entire country.”

Now, Metrolink is the flagship project through which the Government wants to change the State’s spending culture in an effort led by his party colleague, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Jack Chambers.

“Metro is moving much quicker than forecast when I came into government,” Chambers told the Dublin Economics Workshop conference in Wexford one week ago. “Some of that relates to the changes that we’ve made. Some of that relates to, I suppose, how we’ve decided to give confidence in our allocation in terms of capital investment and delivery.”

The minister displayed deep interest in, and knowledge of, the “changes” in question – those nitty-gritty administrative processes that can make or break infrastructure projects. He went beyond the customary name-checking of emergency quangos, such as the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce and the Housing Activation Office, to detail concrete examples.

In one case, the Marine Area Regulatory Authority (Mara), which issues permits for offshore activities such as preparations for wind farms, has cut its decision-making time by 30% “without any big staff increase,” he said.

Another agency worthy of ministerial praise for improving efficiency was the EPA. Meanwhile, a utility like ESB Networks, when it transports a heavy load from Foynes port to a new substation in the midlands, can now obtain one road permit instead of applying to each local authority along the way and waiting for each to answer, he added.

Jobs for consultants or “standing expertise”?

Metrolink offers an opportunity for the State to go further and build its own capacity. 

On September 10, Transport Infrastructure Ireland appointed the global engineering firms Jacobs and Aecom as programme delivery partners for the project. They will be tasked with “ensuring that all aspects of the Metrolink project are delivered within a defined budget, required timeframe, and to the highest standards of safety and quality,” TII said. 

For a pre-tender estimated price of €550 million, Jacobs and Aecom will therefore manage contractors on behalf of the State. More jobs for consultants, then? On an infrastructure project expected to be the most expensive in the history of the State, this was always going to be the case. 

But Metrolink is also set to get its own “delivery body”, approved by cabinet last November but yet to be established through dedicated legislation. Chambers said the new body would develop “standing expertise” and “a very clear structure of accountability” to the minister and the secretary general of the Department of Transport. Specialist recruitment over the coming years of the project’s build-out will increase “professionalisation” and capacity for risk management on the State’s side, he added.

When it comes to “giving confidence,” government pledges or money aren’t enough. Speaking after Chambers, the head of DPER’s relatively new infrastructure division, Jasmina Behan, pointed out that her department had just published the latest version of the National Development Plan’s construction pipeline. This list of projects not only states how much in taxpayers’ funds is allocated to each, but also where they stand in the procurement process, and when they are due to move to the next stage.

Behan highlighted the passing of the Critical Infrastructure Act in July, from a blank slate in January – a level of legislative speed not seen since the bank guarantee, she noted. Chambers was unapologetic about the exemption from climate legislation built for critical infrastructure into new law, insisting that projects with a clear mandate should not be suspended to later interpretation of environmental requirements, in light of the recent series of court decisions over the Coolglass wind farm.

In the room, there was widespread acknowledgement from academic and private-sector sources that the Government is improving Ireland’s ability to deliver infrastructure – remaining bottlenecks notwithstanding – with Chambers’s willingness to get his hands dirty a significant contributor.

Kevin Dillon, the head lobbyist for the housing developer Glenveagh (and a former advisor to Chambers’s Fianna Fáil party), saw a shift in the country’s attitude on the occasion of the Dartmouth Square saga. There, those residents behind a court challenge to Metrolink eventually sold their houses to the State after public outcry had shown it is “less socially acceptable now to stand in the way of delivery”, Dillon said. Yet he still pointed out that it takes more time to get planning permission for houses than to build them.

“I’m trying to use an economic ministry to drive reform.”

Jack Chambers

With the budget around the corner, Chambers wants to take the progress and goodwill emerging in the roll-out of capital expenditure and replicate it on the current spending side.

“I think it’s clear that a lot of people see the commitment across the system to move the dial on infrastructure delivery, and I believe we need to create that same philosophy now when it comes to controlling public expenditure across current and capital programmes, but also making the case for much greater levels of reform,” he said.

This is easier said than done. Chambers’s comments signal his intention to negotiate steep productivity gains in much-awaited public-sector pay talks. If Mara’s regulators can increase their output significantly on a constant budget, he will expect other civil servants to do the same in exchange for any pay rise.

Healthy tax receipts mean the money is there for a generous pay deal. But the minister for public expenditure gives the visible impression that he is getting bored of just spending money, and more excited at increasing the return he can get from it.

After his speech, I asked Chambers whether he felt he had more of an impact on the country with the “expenditure” or the “reform” part of his title. “I’m trying to use an economic ministry to drive reform. Ultimately, we have sanctioning authority to every government department and agency, and it’s placing greater conditionality on how we expect them to work, and how citizens that I represent expect them to work, to deliver more,” he replied.

In his view, the budget debate about the amount of money required by different arms of the State was valid “five to six years ago”. “I think that has been more than answered in many areas but ultimately, the reform discussion maybe doesn’t get the level of consideration when expenditure was growing quite significantly,” he said.

Chambers’s priority now is to apply tougher budgetary constraints, prioritise reform and efficiency, and get better value and output from a given level of spending, he continued. “Putting the budgets aside, an infrastructure system which is too slow means nothing to people who want to see quicker delivery. That’s where we’re seeing the early positive outworking of that, and it’s replicating that kind of laser focus across other areas of public expenditure,” he said.

Chambers’s progress with the sections of the state apparatus dedicated to infrastructure is no guarantee of success when it comes to behemoths like health or education. In addition to pay negotiations already marked by the threat of strikes, he will also have to contend with his cabinet colleagues more concerned with political expediency.

Aside from capital and current expenditure, there is a third category of spending in the budget: tax expenditure – the Exchequer revenue foregone through cuts and rebates. I put it to Chambers that the largest recent items in this category, such as the reduced Vat rate for hospitality and the ongoing excise cuts on motor fuels, had this in common that economists saw them as particularly inefficient uses of taxpayers’ money.

He replied that such “adjustments” amounted to a fraction of other spending categories and were connected to material cost drivers. “I would argue you mentioned some of the more contentious or divisive ones,” he added. By contrast, less hotly debated adjustments in entreprise taxation, and the Irish implementation of the Beps process on international rules applying to multinationals, have yielded “improved confidence of investment and improved foreign direct investment into Ireland”, he said.

Elsewhere last week…

Tom interviewed Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke with just weeks left before Budget 2027. Burke said he expects “good wins” for SMEs but he has a fight on his hands to get all he wants.

Francesca took a deep dive into the bitter legal battle between contractor Bert’s Properties and the Irish property Reit GDL Management Group, which has been the only company to become listed on Dublin’s main Euronext stock market in recent years.

Niall’s investigation into Irish licences for the export of dual-use goods to the Israeli arms industry since the start of the assault on Gaza and Lebanon showed multiple sign-offs despite “high risk” warnings, followed by a swift shift to restrict exports in late 2024 after stricter EU laws came into effect.

After leaving Grant Thornton and spending four years running technology company Ergo, Paul McCann told Ian that he missed being “at the centre of things”. Now he is back, with a private-equity-backed plan to build Ecovis into a significant Irish accountancy and advisory player.