Ireland ‘faffed around’ on Metrolink and 'wasted a good recession' to build it, summit hears

IRELAND “FAFFED AROUND” on the construction of the Metrolink and squandered a decade in which the project could have been built more cheaply and efficiently, a leading transport expert has said.

Speaking at a panel discussion at the Association of Consulting Engineers Ireland conference in Croke Park this afternoon, Professor Brian Caulfield of Trinity College Dublin said the State repeatedly delayed and reconfigured major infrastructure projects, driving up costs and eroding delivery capacity.

“We faffed around,” Caulfield said, referring to Metrolink.

“A project that cost €2 billion is now going to cost a hell of a lot more.”

Caulfield said Ireland’s infrastructure system had failed to act decisively during periods when labour and construction costs were lower, instead allowing projects to drift through redesigns, legal challenges and shifting political priorities.

We wasted a good recession.

Metrolink, the proposed 18.8km metro line planned from Swords to Charlemont, was first proposed in the mid-2000s as Metro North.

Funding was approved for the Metro North was approved in 2008 with construction due to begin in 2009, but the project was shelved following the 2008 global financial crash.

At the time, the project was estimated to cost around €2.5 billion.

Caulfield argued that Metrolink should have been built then, “when we had an awful lot of unemployment”.

“We changed our mind. We built the Luas, and that then resulted in a complete redesign of that project. And now it’s 2026 and there isn’t a shovel in the ground yet,” Caulfield added.

Metrolink was relaunched in 2018 under its current name. Despite being one of the largest transport projects in the history of the State, construction is not now expected to begin until at least 2028. Earlier timelines had suggested operation by 2027, but officials have since conceded that was unrealistic.

The project has also faced repeated planning and legal delays. A judicial review challenge by Ranelagh residents over An Coimisiún Pleanála’s approval was withdrawn late last year after Transport Infrastructure Ireland reached a settlement involving the purchase of affected homes in Dartmouth Square for more than €30 million.

Costs have also escalated sharply. The most recent official estimate from 2021 put Metrolink at €9.5 billion, but current projections suggest the final figure could exceed €15.8 billion, with some estimates placing it above €23 billion.

Caulfield said Ireland’s approach to infrastructure delivery risked repeating the same pattern across other major projects, including housing, water and energy schemes.

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He warned that cost-benefit analysis tools used in Ireland were not always suited to modern infrastructure decisions, particularly where climate and wider economic impacts are difficult to quantify.

“Projects with huge climate benefits can fail on paper,” Caulfield said in the discussion, adding that traditional appraisal methods were often “not fit for purpose” for 21st-century infrastructure.

He also argued that failure to properly account for the “cost of not building” projects was distorting decision-making.

On Metrolink specifically, he said the economic cost of delay was substantial, citing earlier estimates that Dublin “loses €700,000 euro every day” due to congestion and lost productivity in the absence of a metro system.

Infrastructure costs

Other speakers at the conference echoed concerns about the pace and predictability of infrastructure delivery.

David Kelly, chief executive of Gas Networks Ireland, said international contractors were increasingly deterred by uncertainty in the Irish planning system.

“It’s hard to get projects over the line here,” Kelly said.

“If you’re a large provider looking at the European market as a whole, you look at jurisdictions where consenting is slicker and there’s more certainty.”

Kelly said Ireland risked losing investment to countries such as Spain and France, where he said energy and infrastructure projects were being delivered at significantly faster pace.

Sean O’Driscoll, chair of the government’s Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce, said the State had become overly risk-averse and slow to take decisions.

“The only way you can eliminate risk is by taking no decisions,” O’Driscoll said.

He said judicial review processes had in some cases become “an industry in themselves”, pointing to Ireland’s relatively high number of environmental legal challenges compared with other EU states.

Ireland carried out 253 environmental impact assessments in 2022, compared with 270 in Germany, a country with a population 17 times larger than Ireland, while Denmark recorded just six judicial reviews in the same period.

On judicial reviews, Seán Keyes, head of infrastructure think tank Progress Ireland, said that the tendency to solve disputes by adding process rather than making decisions was a structural problem in democratic systems.

“If there is a conflict between two groups, rather than adjudicating it, making a call, we say: all right, we need to add a process in to fix this conflict,” Keyes said.

“This results in a sort of procedure fetish, where the process is kind of the end that people care about, rather than stepping back and saying, well, what are we trying to actually do here.”

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