Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 22 April 2026
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment
Competitiveness and the Cost of Doing Business in Ireland: Progress Ireland
2:00 am
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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I wish everyone a good afternoon. They are all very welcome to our public meeting.
Before we proceed, I have a few housekeeping matters to go through. I wish to explain some limitations to parliamentary privilege and the practice of the Houses as regards the references witnesses make to other persons in their evidence. Witnesses are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the presentation they make to the committee. This means they have an absolute defence against any defamation action for anything they say at the meeting. However, they are expected not to abuse this privilege and it is my duty as Chair to ensure this privilege is not abused. Therefore, if a witness's statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks and it is imperative that they comply with any such direction.
I advise members of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex in order to participate in public meetings. I will not permit a member to participate where he or she is not adhering to that constitutional requirement. Therefore, any member who attempts to participate from outside the precincts will be asked to leave the meeting. In this regard, I ask members participating via Microsoft Teams to confirm, prior to making their contribution to the meeting, that they are on the grounds of the Leinster House campus.
Members and witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if statements are potentially defamatory in respect of an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.
The minutes of the previous meetings on 11 February 2026, 24 February 2026, 25 February 2026, 3 March 2026, 24 March 2026 and 15 April 2026 were circulated and agreed in private session. Are the minutes agreed? Agreed.
Competitiveness and the cost of doing business in Ireland is item No. 2 on today's agenda. It is our second item of business in the committee's engagement with representatives of Progress Ireland. We look forward to discussing with Progress Ireland competitiveness, the cost of doing business in Ireland and any other related matters. Progress Ireland will be aware that competitiveness and the cost of doing business in Ireland are priority policy issues for the committee and we look forward to hearing any views that they may have on those particular matters. I propose that we publish the opening statement provided by our witnesses on the committee's website. Is that agreed? Agreed.
I suggest that we now invite our witnesses to speak for approximately ten minutes. We will then allow our members to ask questions or make comments for approximately seven minutes.
If time permits, we may have a second round of questions where members will be allowed to speak, ask questions or make comments for approximately four minutes. Members may be called as they appear on the week 3 speaking rota, which was circulated before today's meeting. Committee members may substitute within their party or group. Members not being members of the committee or substitutes may speak only after committee members or their substitutes. We will take a short break after 90 minutes. Is that agreed? Agreed.
I am delighted to welcome the representatives of Progress Ireland to today's meeting. We are joined by Mr. Seán Keyes, executive director, and Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin, director of housing policy. They are very welcome to today's meeting. I now invite Mr. Keyes, executive director of Progress Ireland, to make his opening statement.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
I thank the Chair and members of the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment for the invitation. I am the executive director of the independent non-partisan think tank, Progress Ireland. I will start by explaining who we are, how we work, how we are funded and what we are trying to achieve. We were founded in 2023. Our board is made up of Fiona Cormican, former CEO of Clúid Housing; Jim Breslin, a former Secretary General; Donal de Buitléir, chair of An Garda Síochána; and Brigid Laffan, chancellor of the University of Limerick. We work on housing, infrastructure and innovation policy. Our modus operandi is to connect Ireland to policy solutions with a proven track record from overseas.
How do we choose which policies to focus on? Our policy choices are determined by three important values. The first is that we believe in building as a general purpose tool for solving policy problems. Ireland’s most pressing problems, from competitiveness to the cost of living, climate, inequality and polarisation, will be solved only by building. Ireland needs to build not just new housing, but also infrastructure, companies and new institutions. The second value is that we believe State capacity is important. We believe the State should be capable of following through on its priorities, whatever they may be. We believe in reforming the State so that it can better follow through on its goals. The third value is that we believe in progress. We believe the world can be much better than it is and that Ireland could and should have the highest living standards in the world.
The next point is about our funding. We are often asked who funds us and what influence our funders have over our policies. These are legitimate questions. We are funded by private philanthropy. Our funders support us because they share our values and believe in our policies, not because they have any influence over the policies we work on. They do not benefit directly from our policy work and we publicly disclose all material funders.
Turning to the second section of my statement, I will touch on our diagnosis of the problems Ireland is facing before we get through to the solutions. This committee is concerned with competitiveness and the cost of doing business. Ireland is a country beset by shortages of physical things such as housing, power, water, trains and ports. Ordinary people experience these shortages in the form of high rents, a high cost of living and queues for homes. Business owners experience them as the cost of doing business and forgone investment. We think these are two sides of the same coin. Investment, on both big and small scales, is bottlenecked by our housing and infrastructure. Citing lack of housing, a big investment bank has chosen Amsterdam over Dublin for its post-Brexit EU headquarters. At the other end of the scale, small enterprises struggle to pay their workers a wage sufficient to cover their rent.
Progress Ireland’s high-level diagnosis of Ireland’s situation is that there is extraordinary demand to live, invest and employ in Ireland and that the State is struggling to build enough to keep up. I have circulated four charts that make that case in a very simple high-level way.
If our first point is that there is a surfeit of demand relative to supply in Ireland, our second is that, in Ireland, money is usually not the bottleneck in solving these problems. We have had plenty of money for the guts of 30 years but, despite this, projects are often slow to get started and to finish. The bottleneck is often elsewhere. Progress Ireland sees its role as identifying and helping to remove these bottlenecks.
Moving to the third section of our statement, having identified who we are and how we work and our diagnosis of the problem, I will lay out the sorts of solutions we have in mind. I will briefly describe four policies we are working on. Each one has the potential to have a big impact on the cost of doing business; each has a strong track record internationally; and each is practical and implementable.
The first is land readjustment. This may be unfamiliar. It is a policy that has been used in 30 countries internationally, including a lot of European countries. However, the biggest proponent of land readjustment is very far away. It is Japan. It is an unfamiliar idea so I will start right at the very start. Thinking about Irish building, housing and land, what do we need? What is the problem? We need hundreds of thousands of homes. We need a step change in the rate of delivery of new homes. We need these homes to be well located near jobs. We want them to be in nicely master-planned walkable communities rather than being built higgledy-piggledy wherever we can fit them. We want to do this without emitting lots of carbon. Building these sorts of communities is going be expensive but we need to do it without bankrupting the nation. Land readjustment is a tool designed to solve this problem. It is used to master-plan neighbourhoods at scale so that they are self-funding. It is used in many places and has a proven track record. Some 30% of urban Japan was built using this tool. How it works is that a qualified majority of landowners in a designated area, perhaps a two-thirds or three-quarters majority, decide to pool their land. They give up roughly a third of it for infrastructure such as roads, parks and the public realm. They give another proportion of it to the planning authority, possibly the council, which sells the land and uses the proceeds to fund the infrastructure. In return, the landowners receive back plots that are smaller but that are serviced and much more valuable because infrastructure will have been built and its zoning will have been changed.
The second policy I will describe, which is a natural complement to land readjustment, is electrified rail. Land readjustment is good at assembling large plots of land at scale so that really big developments of 10,000 homes or more can be built. If you are going to build at that scale, you need a different category of infrastructure to do it. Electrified rail is in that category. Rail in Ireland has been discussed mainly in terms of its environmental benefits. The big proponents of rail have come from the Green Party. We are missing something here, however. Rail's real superpower is its capacity. Rail can move massive numbers of people. In a rail network that has been fully invested in, one rail track can move as many people as 42 lanes of motorway. Once you internalise that, you start to see the potential of pairing it with ambitious housing investments. If we can move a lot of people, we can build quite large developments, we can build intensively and use the land value uplift to pay for things. It all becomes possible. Rail is what enables large numbers of people to be moved around, which enables everything else. That is what goes well with land readjustment.
Street votes are a first cousin of land readjustment. They are a different type of tool, however. Where land readjustment is about master-planning very large communities, street votes are about gently densifying our suburban areas. Most of the jobs we have added in Ireland have been added in towns and cities. The trouble with that is that it is in urban areas that it is hardest to build new homes. The result has been higher costs for business and longer commutes. Street votes are designed to resolve that. In a similar way to land readjustment, this policy works on the basis of a qualified majority vote. The residents of a very small area, like a street, get together and agree a mutually amenable planning scheme at the level of that street and pass it or not based on a qualified majority vote.
You could say the last policy we are working on that I will mention is about MetroLink but it can be generalised to all of the most complex projects the State works on. As Ireland gets bigger and richer, it is going to have to deliver bigger, more complex and more ambitious projects, especially in respect of infrastructure. The children’s hospital is a good example, but it will not be the last. MetroLink is another one.
The DART+ tunnel, which we are big proponents of, is another example. Better government software might be one such project also. When it comes to complex projects, there is a proven path to delivering them smoothy, quickly and efficiently, which is for the Government to employ and empower more experts.
In the context of MetroLink, I circulated a chart, which I will quickly describe. It shows the average cost of building 1 km of metro tunnel. From eyeballing the chart, members will see there is a big dispersal. At the more efficient and cheaper end, there are Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Finland and Türkiye. They are building that 1 km at approximately 10% of the cost that New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Belgium are paying. There is huge dispersal. Basically, the most expensive places are where there has been a failure to take account of the message that governments need to employ and empower experts to deliver complex projects. When that is not done in the MetroLink domain, this is what happens.
In the case of our MetroLink, employing market-rate experts and giving a team of them control over the project for, say, ten years might cost in the region of €50 million. However, as members can see, the dispersal of potential costs for a project like MetroLink goes from maybe €11 billion up to somewhere in the region of €20 billion or €30 billion. There is a huge range of outcomes on the table. That is why it is worth investing in State capacity to deliver these complex projects.
I will stop there. I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak and I welcome questions.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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That was fascinating.
Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Keyes agus Mr. O’Neill for being here. We have met previously on a number of occasions. I congratulate them on the work Progress Ireland is doing. It is valuable and helps to inform public debate in a constructive and progressive way. Mr. Keyes talked about the State building capacity. The first time we met was about four years ago when our challenges were enormous. I was my party’s housing spokesperson at the time, and we agreed that we needed to build capacity. We have seen quite a step change since then. Mr. Keyes talked about budget and investment. We brought housing investment from less than €500 million per year to €11 billion this year. Some 170,000 new homes have been built since we took over housing in 2020. While no one is sitting on their laurels or suggesting that this is enough, those changes and the quantum increase in the delivery of housing have come about because we changed policy, legislation and funding.
This week, I was in Fairview visiting Richmond Village just off the Richmond Road, where close to 800 new homes are being built. The witnesses are probably familiar with the site. The sod was being turned on it. It is a partnership between the Land Development Agency, LDA, Dublin City Council and private builders. Walls Construction will be building the homes. They will all be affordable homes within a 3 km walk of O’Connell Street. It builds on the success of the LDA delivering homes at Shanganagh Castle Estate. We set up the LDA, put it on a statutory footing and gave it the capacity to assemble land and deliver not just social housing but also affordable purchase and affordable cost-rental homes. We are using public lands to deliver public housing. Have we done enough with the LDA? Does it have sufficient authority? Does more need to be done?
My second question relates to the investment in all of the utilities required to deliver housing, which Mr. Keyes mentioned. When we talk about water, it is Uisce Éireann. When we talk about energy, it is EirGrid and when we talk about transport and the MetroLink, it is the NTA. I completely agree that we need to invest in the capacity of the State. State companies must invest in human resources, expertise, knowledge and capacity to deliver projects at scale. Has Progress Ireland carried out any work in examining how those organisations, which have received significant increases in funding, are recruiting? Are they recruiting and building the capacity, or are they relying on external consultant service providers? If the witnesses have any views or insights they could share with the committee in that regard, I would appreciate it.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
I am familiar with the scheme at St. Vincent’s Hospital. It is maybe 100 m, as the crow flies, from my home. It is a nice site. I do not know the size of it, but it is probably around 10 ha. It is in a lovely location, within walking distance of the city centre. It is big enough that a coherent community can be built there, with a mixture of services, different types of units, some nice public ground and all of that. The size of it justifies the investment on public ground. It has all the stuff you would want. That is what is possible when there is a nice site within a short distance of jobs. The LDA is turning that around.
With the land readjustment and electrified rail idea, we are trying to create more of those sites from whole cloth. There are opportunities because there are tonnes of land relatively close to jobs in our urban centres. Something similar to what is being done on the site in Fairview cannot be achieved on those lands because there is a lack of transport infrastructure or the site is messy. For example, there may be nine landowners and one of them does not want to sell, or other similar issues. Land readjustment is designed to try to overcome all of those bottlenecks that prevent us from turning sites around, such as the greenfields to the east of Galway city between Galway and Athenry that are a couple of kilometres, as the crow flies, from the centre of Galway. There are other such sites all around Limerick, between Cork and Midleton and between Dublin and Naas or Dublin up to Skerries. There is a lot of land but it is awkward for one reason or another. We are trying to turn those awkward plots into big, master plan communities where we and the LDA can deliver at scale. We are keen to work with the LDA in that regard.
The Senator asked about recruitment in our utilities sector. The one that is nearest and dearest to me is MetroLink. We had the right idea recruiting Seán Sweeney. His personal affairs meant that it did not work out, which was unfortunate for all concerned. It took a long time to get Mr. Sweeney in. A project like MetroLink needs more than one person like him who has delivered before. Depending on who you ask, as many as 15 market-rate professionals who have worked on mega projects might be needed. We need more of them. The current plan is that we have a contract arrangement with a company, Turner & Townsend, and we have brought in its experienced people. They will be working on MetroLink but they will not be on the Government’s books exactly. That is a second-best solution. The track record shows that for mega projects such as MetroLink, ten to 15 people who have done it before are needed. The crucial point is not to bring them in as consultants and place them in an office somewhere. Rather, they must make the decisions and control the project. Bureaucratically, that is not necessarily straightforward. There are some reforms involved in order to do that. That is an important point.
Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)
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I agree with Mr. Keyes. It is critical because if the person who is charged with making the decisions is not invested in and committed and accountable to the organisation, it is just too easy not to make decisions.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for being here today. Forgive me but I had never heard of Progress Ireland before, so I will ask a couple of questions to give the committee a better understanding of the organisation. Progress Ireland says it is independent and non-partisan and that its funders have no influence on its policies. Obviously, we welcome that. Donors giving over €5,000 are named on its website and include Meta, the Collison brothers, Smyths Toys Superstores and Amazon, among others.
Can Progress Ireland say who its largest donor is and how much?
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I am just asking about the largest donor. Who is it? I have limited time and have a couple of other questions I want to ask.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Our policy on donations is we disclose all our material donors but do not disclose the exact amount. We do not accept donations from people who benefit directly from what we do. If the Deputy is asking for the euro amount, it simply does not work to list the euro amount of every donor because if you are trying to fund the thing on an ongoing basis, year on year, donors would not necessarily be happy----
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Mr. Keyes cannot say who the largest donor is but obviously that donor will be declared somewhere because his organisation is open and transparent in what it does. It is important there be transparency, particularly given what Progress Ireland is doing in terms of trying to influence Government policy. That goes across the board. That is the way we should always operate.
The witnesses' proposals on exempting small-scale units from planning permission closely mirror policies promoted by the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. These are two right-wing, libertarian organisations funded by Charles Koch. Did the witnesses derive their ideas from those organisations? How do they explain the overlap?
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
I am aware of the Cato Institute's existence; I have actually never heard of the other one. I will mention some context. That particular policy has been implemented in several countries. That latest one I have seen in the news is Mayor Mamdani in New York, who describes himself as socialist. It would not be fair to characterise at the outset this policy as right wing, as the Deputy did.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Does Mr. O'Neill McPartlin agree there is an overlap with the Cato Institute in terms of what he proposes?
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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So you are saying there is an overlap but you do not know what the Cato Institute basically does or proposes. You are saying there is not any connection with what you are doing.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Great, thank you. In a document reported by Dublin InQuirer, Progress Ireland referred to Ireland as being "highly conformist and ... more prone to deference to elite or expert consensus than our British counterparts”. What did it mean by that?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Our MO is to connect Ireland up to ideas from overseas. How do you do that? How do you make people in Ireland see the benefit of ideas that have been tried overseas and have a track record overseas? We felt and still feel it is important that Ireland sees our problems are not unique. Other places have solved them and we can look at what people have done in other countries and learn from it. We can learn from our European cousins and benefit from their solutions. We do not have to think things through from first principles.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Okay. It has been stated that Progress Ireland was set up because Ireland has a lot of untapped potential. I have to agree with that, being a rural TD, but much of what the witnesses have said today seems to be urban focused - locating housing developments near jobs in urban areas, for example. Has Progress Ireland done any assessment of the impact on rural areas?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Yes. Our first policy is on small units in ADUs and gardens. ADUs have been tried elsewhere but just because something has been tried elsewhere does not mean it will work in Ireland. We set about testing the hypothesis that this might be useful in Ireland. We sampled at random several hundred eircodes around the country and assessed whether there was enough space and fire access, and whether rents were high enough in the location to justify building them. We expected to find that, if this worked, it would work in south County Dublin or places like that where rents are extremely high and there are lots of big gardens. What we found was a broad swathe of Ireland where housing shortages are acute enough and rents high enough that building build a unit in someone's land would be worthwhile.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Does Progress Ireland publish accounts?
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Will that not name the donors? It is important, when witnesses are before the committee influencing policy, that we have transparency around where donations are coming from, in the same way as we all declare as politicians around here what is done. There are certain codes of practice and standards.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Are all the donors on the website and how much they give?
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Right but you do not say how much they give. Do you say how much it takes to run your organisation? Are all of those figures there?
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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So it is all there.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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That is very good. I am not saying this to be obstructive but it is important we know that. If that information is there, I am happy that it is.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Okay. I will look that up.
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
We started this almost three years ago. Since then we have built a very good board with former Secretary General, Jim Breslin, and chancellor of UL, Brigid Laffan. We take proper governance seriously. We have a good team. The minute costs - the full breakdown - are fully managed by our board. It is not just us managing all this money. It is a very professional board that manages it. We have high standards of governance.
On disclosing amounts, as Mr. Keyes pointed out, we take private donations from individuals and philanthropic funds. We do not take public money. We might be unique in that. I am open to correction, so I will not put too much emphasis on that.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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What is your turnover?
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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And that is all-inclusive. That gives me a much better understanding.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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We have gone two minutes over. I did not interrupt the Deputy because I think everyone is entitled to ask their questions but I would be careful. It is my duty as Chair to protect the witnesses as well our members. We do not want to interject a sense of innuendo.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Not at all.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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If we compare Progress Ireland to the IIEA and other think-tanks, I am not aware of a structure where individual donors are listed. To be fair to it, Progress Ireland seems to list donors over a certain threshold. It is just maybe the innuendo, that is all. I did not interrupt because each member is entitled to ask their questions. The Deputy's time has expired, unfortunately.
Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Thank you, Chair. It is important we know. It is an opportunity for transparency. These committees always are.
Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for coming in. Like my colleague, I had not heard of them before so it is lovely to meet them. I was just looking at their graphs. I had to take pictures to zoom in because my eyes are so bad. It is saying, "Ireland is building lots of houses". Of the 19 countries represented, it looks like we are building the most. We are building double the amount of the UK per 1,000 residents but another chart shows the housing shortage, which is similar to the UK.
Progress Ireland is saying money is not usually a bottleneck in the context of the problems going on here, and that it "sees its role as identifying and helping to remove bottlenecks". Has it looked at County Meath as an example? It is one of the counties with the fastest growing populations. Navan, in particular, is one of the fastest growing towns. Has Progress Ireland identified anything in the county in respect of bottlenecks or where there are problems?
I was very interested in the street votes. It was said that what would happen in a street vote is that by a supermajority the residents of a single street would vote to grant themselves permission to extend or add storeys to their homes subject to a mutually agreed design code and that this would unlock density in a gentle way that has local consent and does not require top-down planning fights. It seems like a nice approach. Again, I am thinking of where I come from in County Meath and if we could get the majority of people in an area to vote for something like that. To take the UK as an example, how many houses in the UK have been done under that model?
In terms of all Progress Ireland's recommendations, then, the four things recommended, what population types are these being suggested for? Is it really just for the Dublins, Corks and Galways, or is it being considered for more rural areas?
Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)
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Very good.
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
I am not intimately familiar with planning policy in Meath County Council. From growing up there, though, I am aware of how fast the county is growing and the major transport bottlenecks, especially to Navan and to east Meath, including Ashbourne, Ratoath and Dunshaughlin.
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
We have the M3 Parkway up there. We need better connections to it, and I know it is part of the expansion of the DART. Land availability and transport capacity are the primary bottlenecks in County Meath. That would be my view but subject to revision if I looked closer at it. Having grown up there, I think transport is the biggest bottleneck.
Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)
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County Meath has not come up on Progress Ireland’s radar.
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
My view of the county is that it has taken a lot of the pressure off Dublin. As the Senator knows, being from Meath, a lot of people there now have Dublin accents because people are being priced out of Dublin. County Meath is taking a lot of the spillover from Dublin. The labour market in Dublin has just expanded past Meath into places like Portlaoise. My view of places like Meath is that they have taken a lot of the pressure off Dublin, and we need to build up closer to Dublin to take some of that pressure off Meath so the county can play catch up with things like transport connections. I am happy to answer follow-up questions on this aspect.
As for street votes, or street plans as we sometimes call them, the status of that policy in the UK is that primary legislation has been passed but secondary legislation has yet to be completed. I believe a British Labour Party group just released a report not two weeks ago asking its Government to implement it. The UK, however, has pursued several analogous policies. One is in relation to the regeneration of social housing. London took on a policy that is sometimes called estate renewal. Residents of social housing blocks which are somewhat rundown and in need of refurbishment are balloted. If the result passes some majority, I think it is 80% or something like that, the city will rehouse people temporarily and redevelop the site at a higher density. In some instances, it will build private housing as well and sell that to subsidise even more social housing than was there initially. The residents are then returned to the new development. I believe there have been about 30 of these projects. It has been an immensely popular and successful policy.
The basic idea of that is quite similar to the street votes idea, that is to say it is intended to empower local residents to make decisions about what happens to them. Often, when development comes, and we know this from County Meath, local residents see it as kind of a net negative. They see new residents as adding a burden of congestion. If people are getting the train or the bus every morning, a new housing estate means more packed trains and buses, and so on. The basic idea of things like street votes is that if local residents are allowed to benefit directly from new development, they will be more likely to support it. The way they benefit in the street votes proposal is that they use their sites, if they all agree, or a sufficient number of them agree, and new planning rules are implemented on their street. They can then develop their sites. Residents would basically make money from new homes being built in their area. Rather than seeing new development as a net negative, bringing extra congestion and so on, it is actually a net positive. By empowering people, you can get them to support more development. This is the essential idea. There are other analogous policies around the world. There was one in South Korea in the 1990s. There were a few of these initiatives dotted around the world. One in Vancouver is ongoing and is, I think, delivering about 6,000 houses. The basic idea is to allow people on the ground to capture some of the benefits of new development. We then see residents becoming supporters of new developments rather than being sceptical opponents of them.
Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)
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There was also my question about the population types in respect of Progress Ireland’s suggestions.
Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)
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If we are talking about electrified rail and land readjustments, are there certain areas in Ireland where Progress Ireland has identified this is needed? Would it, for example, involve areas with populations over 10,000 or 20,000 or just where there is seen to be an issue or a bottleneck as it was called?
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
Yes. Our version of things like land readjustment is specifically designed for the urban development zones in the Planning and Development Act 2024. Nobody knows exactly where these zones will be but we can all predict they will be along the DART extensions, along the Metrolink and around places like Cork and Galway.
Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)
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Great. I thank Mr. O'Neill McPartlin.
Linda Nelson Murray (Fine Gael)
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I thank Mr. Keyes.
Albert Dolan (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the two Seáns from Progress Ireland for being with us. I will reflect on the line of questioning taken by another Deputy. It is very important that there is transparency and good governance. I welcome that Progress Ireland has clearly stated it publishes the names of any donors of more than €5,000 on its website. I do not think it is possible to get much more transparent than that. I do not believe there is a SIPO obligation on Progress Ireland to declare exactly how much any individual donates to it. The people involved in it are not designated public officials, while we are. There is a clear distinction there. When we have time to question people before us, it is important that we use it in a productive manner. It was said that Progress Ireland’s donors do not benefit directly from the work it does but I hope they do benefit if it leads to a better Ireland. Progress Ireland is trying to put forward new ideas and new ways of thinking, and, ultimately, stir conversation.
This leads me to my first question. I have been working on the Committee of Public Accounts over the last year to improve transparency and public accountability. I do not believe the State needs to spend more money; I believe we need to spend it more efficiently. I was intrigued by Progress Ireland's proposal regarding how it believes it could save €14.9 billion on the Metrolink. Could the witnesses take me through that?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Sure. I will go back to the opening statement and give the Deputy a bit more detail on where those numbers are coming from and what they are actually referring to. I refer to the last chart at the end of our submitted document. The problem with infrastructure projects is that no two are alike. Housing is a little easier to study because a house is a house. We can compare one country to another, one region to another, and look at the average costs. There are millions of them around the place. We can tease out cause-and-effect and what is making housing cheaper or more expensive to build, to live in and so on.
That is not necessarily the case for a train terminal, a tunnel, a metro or any of these megaprojects. Governments find themselves in the situation where they have very high stakes projects. They are trying to fund them and manage them as best they can but they do not feel like they have got a track record to learn from because everything is as if it is being done from scratch. Ireland is not Istanbul and not Manila, so what are we to learn from those places about how we build things?
Having said all that, folks in the US, transit researchers, were looking at the extraordinary cost of building transport infrastructure in that country and trying to understand what was going on.
A bunch of them spent several years at it - I think it was four or five years in total. They stitched together a dataset of every metro project in the world going back a century. What they ended up with was several hundred projects. At least with metros it is somewhat apples to apples. You can compare a kilometre of metro on a like for like basis if you have a big enough dataset.
Having done that, they had a big dataset and the first thing they noticed was that there was a huge discrepancy, as our intuition said, this is a bit strange. The first hypothesis might be that it is very expensive to build in expensive countries and that is what accounts for it. That did not turn out to be the case. There was basically no relationship between how much it cost to build a metro in India versus New York so there was something else going on. Through their research interviewing participants, the key factors they identified were as follows. First, the most efficient projects were faster, so it seems there is a direct relationship between the speed of a complex project and how much it costs to build. Every day on site is expensive and the faster you can get the thing done the better. They tried to understand what makes things go fast or slow and it kind of came down to governance, in other words who has control over the project and who makes the decisions.
Albert Dolan (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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Does Mr. Keyes believe that better governance is where we will see the biggest cost savings?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Yes, and I think it is a gating condition. It is necessary before the project can go any further. For instance, in the United States they have lots of money and need a metro so will fund it, cobble it together and figure it out as they go. They will bring in some consultants to help to manage it and so on. However, the government that wants the project may not have the expertise to actually manage a project and to know what is or is not a fair price, when it is taking too long or when it is too quick. They may dig under the ground, find something weird they were not expecting and have to make a decision on the fly. If the people making those big decisions are not experts but, rather, generalist civil servants, which is what you see in these high-cost countries, then how does a generalist civil servant figure out what to do about it? They would have to go through their processes, consult with their consultants, take time over it and eventually they will get the answer. It might be the right answer but it will take ages. Whereas what results in fast, efficient projects is if the people in the driver's seat are themselves experts.
The two important components of it are, first, getting the right people in who have done it before. They might cost money - more than civil servants are paid. Second is actually giving them control so they do not have to go running up the chain and go through the processes every day when making decisions on the ground.
Albert Dolan (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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I appreciate that. Progress Ireland's website has a policy brief, "The blueprint: 25 ideas to deliver 300,000 homes". Out of the 25 ideas, which does Mr. O'Neill McPartlin think would be the most powerful?
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
Most of those 25 ideas are small. Some of them, the Government has done of its own accord. One idea was to zone for a lot more land. The Minister, Deputy Browne, has done that with his recent section 28 housing growth requirements. Another idea was to change the apartment standards, which has also been done by the Minister, though presumably not because he read Progress Ireland's website.
Of those ideas yet to be done, the one that stands out to us, the Deputy will not be surprised to hear, is land readjustment. We have all of these massive projects the State is relying on in urban development zones. This is a load-bearing part of the Government's plan. There are significant problems with urban development zones as we plan to implement them and one of those is funding the infrastructure. We know that the large-scale infrastructure required to deliver housing is extraordinarily expensive, to the order of hundreds of millions of euro per scheme. We know that from the strategic development zones such as Cherrywood, Adamstown, Clonburris and so on. Land readjustment around the world has been used for precisely this problem, to fund infrastructure to deliver housing, and we think the timing and alignment with Government policy is just right. That is the idea that stands out to me in that context.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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We have had a fascinating hour. Before I ask my first question I will preface it by saying I am totally on the same page as Deputy Dolan in relation to what Progress Ireland is doing, and if the ideas it puts across will save the State money, I am on board. I really am and that might not have come across fully here. To give me a bit of meat on Progress Ireland, how did the witnesses come up with the ideas of setting up the organisation, what are its goals, and, more important, how does it hope to achieve those goals?
I want to pick up on the fact that the conversation has very much been urban-based. Does Progress Ireland not feel that rural Ireland should also play a part in that? I am from Wexford-Wicklow and my goal would be to have people working and living in the area they are from. It ticks so many boxes. It takes people off that N11. People are on it for up to 40 hours per week. Mentally, their carbon footprint, everything is completely rotten.
I note Progress Ireland says that we need more experts on the MetroLink and complex projects. I am not disagreeing, but just this month, we had a report in that €260 million has been spent already on MetroLink and, as the saying goes, there has not been a block laid.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
When we were setting up Progress Ireland, we were trying to do two things simultaneously. The first was around the ideas and the agenda, and the second was about how in Ireland there seemed to be a missing piece in the system of having an independent body whose sole job it is to think about policies and try to promote good policy. These organisations are part of the furniture all around the world, not just in the US and the UK but in Europe as well. They are normal. We thought something like that would have an impact and would work.
Obviously, nobody who sets up an organisation like this is completely neutral about policies and has no ideas and no agenda whatsoever. That does not make any sense. The actual agenda we were really taken with and wanted to drive with was American and very online I guess, but it is this idea of abundance, building and State capacity. The problems we are facing in Ireland are the problems of modern, rich countries. They overlap a lot with what you find in other places. A lot of very sophisticated thinking has gone into how to resolve the exact same problems we have here. We felt that thinking needed to be brought here and that if there were solutions that were ready to go off the shelf, that we could localise them, understand how they fit into the Irish context and, I hope, have some impact with them.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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On that point there, did Mr. Keyes pick that idea from somewhere else? Did he pick a model he saw in the United States, England or Japan?
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Is Mr. Keyes replicating them from somewhere else?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
What the ideas have in common is that people who are very interested in policy are on the Internet and swapping ideas left and right and the ideas are being plucked from all over the place. Land readjustment has been around since the 1950s in Japan. Street votes started in Korea and then were in Israel and the UK. Transit cost projects and metro stuff, as can be seen by that dataset, is completely global, but the original research is from American groups. YIMBY, building that whole intellectual framework about building and reforming planning and zoning as a way to achieving more building and lowering rents and housing costs originated in the US but it is very much global now, very international. They are international ideas. The problems are international but they also are local. They are the ones we have here and we think the solutions that are being driven internationally are suitable here as well. That was our impetus. We thought those ideas needed to be heard.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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I am conscious of the time. I am aware of Progress Ireland's goals but how will it get to its goals?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
In regard to our goals and how to achieve them, our goal is to raise the status of these ideas, to persuade people. We speak in the media and broadcast on the radio. We are assiduously building all of our social media lists and are trying to get these ideas out there, into the water as it were. We are talking to groups like this. We are very pleased to be speaking to groups like this, of important people for whom we think these ideas are practically useful and can solve problems.
The Deputy was asking about our goals and how we achieve them. A big part of our modus operandiis that a good idea for us, and one we would try to promote, is not necessarily our favourite idea but the one that is the best fit for the Irish problems. We are trying to figure out what solution can get through the Oireachtas, the local authorities and all the constraints that make it hard to do things anywhere and solve a problem for a Minister, a TD or a local authority councillor. When the Deputy was asking about our goals and how we achieve them, that is how we go about it. We try to pick the ones that are most practical and most implementable here in Ireland.
On urban and rural, we are talking about building a stronger backbone to our regional transport systems. You might have a backbone going from east Cork to Cork city, from Galway to Athenry, from Limerick to Adare or up to Ennis and from Dublin to Naas or over to Navan or up to Drogheda. This would be the backbone that carries the commuters and, we hope, get them out of the cars and give them shorter commutes and a better cost of living. Obviously they would feed into the urban centres but there are regional systems as well and they would work to the benefit of everybody else who lives in Louth, Meath, Waterford and wherever else they might be.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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All right. What about more expertise when already we have spent €260 million?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
In fairness, the transit cost guys - the researchers who came up with this MetroLink study - have a giant report on their learnings from studying all these projects. One of the big ones when it comes to this is "Measure twice, cut once". Once you dig the hole in the ground, that is when costs can really go haywire so it benefits the project to think carefully, have it all set up, have your governance right, mind your p's and q's, and have your i's crossed and t's dotted and all the rest of it before you start. I am not going to say I am personally across that €260 million and can vouch for every penny of it but that principle of getting it right first so you can then have a fast project that is cost-effective is the right way to think about it.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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As a last question, does Mr. Keyes feel that was not done with the children's hospital?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Everyone beats up on the children's hospital and I will join in as well. That is exactly what happened with the children's hospital. It was launched into. It is a perfect example. They started the project without even having finalised the designs. That is when you get into that cycle of the wrong incentives, the wrong governance and all that.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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It goes back to the very point I made at the start, which is that the one who will get the hit will be the taxpayer.
Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)
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I thank the witnesses for their contribution. Wherever their funding comes from - it is transparent over €5,000 on their website - there is no harm in generating ideas, whether they are considered left-wing, right-wing or in between. Obviously, as a Deputy I am most interested in best practice. Before I ever met the witnesses or ever heard of the Cato Institute I was advocating for the Minister to put building into back gardens - this was just two months into my term - and also to allow older estates like those in Palmerstown where there is a large demographic of people over the age of 80 to be allowed build to above the top level of the house and then have refurbishment of the ground level so people can continue to live where they grew up, and close to all the amenities. I cite Palmerstown because it has a very close-knit community but there is no so-called age-friendly housing that people can move to. They do not want to move so you have got people in four-bedroom houses who do not want to sell. What if there was a model for them?
I have a couple of queries on the street referendum situation. It might require some legislative change to get that supermajority. Decisions should be made at the lowest effective level and I am interested to know how that would happen in terms of Irish legislation.
On building in general, I would like the witnesses' opinion on building up in Dublin. I am talking about office blocks that are not used, about climate change and about needing to go on stilts. We could be going massively higher in Dublin city centre between the canals, where for a couples of censuses in the 1960s and 1970s the population declined.
The witnesses referenced the SDZs. The Adamstown and Clonburris SDZ is in my constituency. Adamstown is so-so, but Clonburris is an absolute disaster because there was no infrastructure tied in with the building. It facilitates up to 2,000 houses being built with no guarantees. People do not have adequate parking spaces and there is no public transport you can rely on to speak of, so you are basically turning them into 15-minute ghettoes where you can walk around for 15 minutes but there is nothing there because the hierarchy for retail is, for example, in Liffey Valley so everyone has to drive everywhere. The strategy here is totally skewed.
I am going to be a little bit of a devil's advocate here. I note that the Collison brothers, Meta and Amazon fund Progress Ireland so I am asking a softer related question here. I am probably a bit of a bore going on about this but I constantly talk about software and pharma companies coming into Dublin because they want to be in Dublin and want to be where the heart is. Some 20% of their workers are from outside Ireland. They are high-earning and they push up prices in suburban areas in my constituency in places like Seven Mills, etc. You have a very high international cohort living in these areas. People who are trying to get affordable housing keep finding that their grants for affordable housing have expired because the prices have gone up again. Meanwhile, if you are talking about the likes of Silicon Valley - I have mentioned this before - you have an underdeveloped area between Mullingar, Tullamore and Athlone that could be a new Silicon Valley. If we want to get the electric train capacity, by rights we should be building new towns as well as developing that gold triangle to try to encourage people to live and commute westwards away from Dublin. I am interested in the witnesses' views on that. Do they think it could work? Do they think a properly planned new town would be part of the model they are talking about? It gets rid of a lot of the structural barriers.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
There is a lot in that. I will say a word quickly as a preamble. Mr. O'Neill McPartlin can answer the question about street votes and we can decide after that. On the street votes, the key mechanism is that there is a vote with maybe a two-thirds or three-quarters majority. The idea behind that is that we think the real bottleneck to building homes in Ireland and around the world is usually consent. It is hard to get stakeholders, neighbours and locals to agree to having building near them. They have a say and they do not want building, so how do you resolve that? It is very difficult. One approach is to steamroller them. Certain places have done it. You can have successes there for a while. If you are lucky, you have a big majority, you are really determined and you ram it through, you can build a fair few homes that way over the heads of locals, but it does not tend to last. It does not tend to be robust in the long run because people, if they do not like what is being built near them, will vote in the next guy and make sure it does not happen. I do not think it is tactically smart or even moral to build homes that are not popular. At the other end, you cannot have a system based on unanimity. You cannot have it that ten out of ten people must agree because that is a recipe for stasis and the country needs to change and adapt as it grows. When it comes to both land readjustment and street votes, it is the same kind of mechanism, which involves coming up with a reasonable supermajority which will be the threshold beyond which people will build. When it comes to land readjustment, it could be three-quarters of the people and three-quarters of the land. For street votes, it might be three-quarters of the residents. As a high level of principle, consent is a really important bottleneck and we think a vote is a good way of getting past that.
Mr. O'Neill McPartlin might want to explain a bit more.
Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)
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Will Mr. O'Neill McPartlin move from the street votes to the other questions in the interests of time?
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
Absolutely. The Deputy mentioned upward extensions and building higher in Dublin. We support that as a general idea. There are a lot of mechanisms that we could use to upwardly extend existing properties rather than just building taller office blocks.
That would include the refurbishment of above-the-shop accommodation, etc. In principle, I agree with the Deputy about cross-subsidising whereby you upward extend and then use the revenue generated to help people renovate. As I say, a lower floor apartment would be suitable for older people. All I can say about that is that I absolutely agree.
The Deputy mentioned Clonburris and dearth of infrastructure there. One reason we are quite keen on land readjustment is that it makes it cheaper for the State to acquire the infrastructure necessary to make not only these new houses but also real new towns and communities. The Deputy also mentioned new towns. Not to harp on regarding land readjustment, but the combination of urban development zones is that the planning framework from a legislative point of view and land readjustment would be the right policy framework to deliver new towns and urban extensions. The question of where you put them is ultimately down to the Government. We are sort of agnostic about where precisely you put them with the proviso that it would have to be well connected and all the capital investment in the national plan would probably be the best guide for where you put these things.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
On services and 15-minute cities, Paris is the quintessential 15-minute city. It works because it has got a lot of bodies. It has a lot of density. People are there, they demand services and businesses pop up to serve them. Where it is hard to get 15-minute cities with lots of amenities and services is where the density level is not high enough. Where you get a density level that is not high enough is where the transport system cannot move a lot of people and where there are bottlenecks on the roads. If you only have a two- or a four-lane road, you cannot have a lot of people. If you do not have a lot of people, you cannot have a community with lots of services around it.
Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)
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It is about co-ordinating the two, which has not happened.
Ollie Crowe (Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentation. It was very informative. In relation to land readjustment, it was mentioned that a qualified majority in a designated area pooled their land. Can they tell us a bit more about this? Does it work if some landowners are unwilling to give up their land?
The witnesses also stated that they are hiring more expert staff for projects such as MetroLink, and that up to €15 billion could be saved. To state the obvious, that is a massive amount of money. Could they give us more detail on how they arrived at that figure? What assumptions or data underpin it? How confident they are in that figure?
With regard to street votes, can they tell us a bit more about how these are used in the UK? When did the system start? To what degree has it been used? Has it caused any issues or has there only been satisfaction with it?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
On the metric assumptions, it is very straightforward. It is hard to predict what a metro will cost before you dig a hole in the ground, When you do, there is a huge dispersal of potential outcomes. New York's system ended up costing - off the top of my head - 25 times more per kilometre than the one in Paris. In two global cities, one of them cost €170 million per kilometre and the other one is costing more than €3 billion. There is this huge range. That is where the €15 billion comes from. It is a bit of a finger in the air, to be honest, but it has to be. It is based on what is a reasonable spread of if we were closer to the good outcome, the good European average, versus if we were closer to the bad outcome or English-speaking-country average.
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
I will take the questions on land pooling. The Senator asked how that mechanism works. He should stop me if I do not quite get to the point. The proposal, as it stands, and how it works in places such as Spain, Germany and Japan, is that landowners voluntarily pool their land into a special purpose vehicle which would be set up to deliver an urban development zone. That is a voluntary contract. The land is then re-plotted by the developing authority, which would be the council, the LDA or a mixture of both. At that point, the landowners get land back in a replotted form - it is a different plot of land - but there would now be a urban development zone, UDZ, designation and the State would begin building infrastructure on it. The State would then sell land that it has taken, hence why landowners' holdings are smaller in the final analysis. That sale is then used to fund the infrastructure.
The Senator asked what would happen if someone did not agree. The current way of doing things is we can have two mechanisms. The first is we negotiate with landowners. That is the status quo. That is the plan for urban development zones as things stand. That has the same problem. Often, landowners do not want to participate and the causes massive delays. There are many examples of this that I am sure all committee members are aware of. The second is we use compulsory purchase, which has its own problems. It takes a long time, it is very expensive, it is legally risky for the State to do and it is also very coercive. There is a lot of reasons not to do it.
With land readjustment, you need the majority of landowners to say "Yes" and to be enthusiastic. Different countries have different legal mechanisms of how to proceed in the event of one or two hold-outs. What we are proposing is that the LDA enhances its compulsory-purchase order powers in the Land Development Agency Act 2021 if there are a small minority of necessary plots to deliver your urban development zone. If someone is on a peripheral site they can just be excluded from the urban development zone, but the underlying principle of this is there has to be a carrot and stick. The current way of doing it is the carrot. It is not quite clear. The incentive to participate is sort of ambiguous. The stick is clear when it is compulsory purchase. This would be to make a much bigger carrot. It is much clearer the upside for landowners and then, in the rare event where you need-----
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Mr. O'Neill McPartlin was talking about the stick. The carrot is that the special purpose vehicle, SPV, can redesignate the land and make it much more valuable, which means you have a reason to participate. It is not only stick. Agricultural land might be worth €70,000 per hectare and if you were to build 100 homes per hectare on it, it might be worth €5 million. So there is a huge delta there to play with. It is that delta that gets used to fund the infrastructure and to incentive the landowners to participate.
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
To be clear, the British Government has not implemented this. It is primary legislation that was passed by the Government that preceded it. The current British Government is, I believe, reviewing that legislation and writing secondary legislation. However, there have been several other countries that have done it, most notably South Korea. In the 1990s, there were huge urban regeneration works. Several thousand homes were delivered in Seoul, in particular. It was an imperfect policy. If the committee members look into it, they will find many reasons we would not like to replicated that purely. The essential point was landowners were given a choice. They were given quite a big carrot - to repeat the metaphor - to participate. A huge amount of Seoul was built out this way. The other analogy is in Canada where an indigenous group owned land in Vancouver. There is a quirk of Canadian law where indigenous peoples are not subject to Vancouver city planning law and they chose to massively increase by vote of themselves what they could develop there. I believe they are making several billion Canadian dollars in doing so.
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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I thank the two Seáns. Apologies, I have been in and out of other committees, but I was watching their opening statements from my office. Mr. Keyes mentioned that we have had plenty of money over the past 30 years. The problem seems to be with delivery. I am involved with a homeless organisation. I know how the emergency housing of 17,000 impacts the people who are using our services. When it comes to health and housing, we seem to have got it wrong regarding delivery, yet Mr. Keyes stated that we have plenty of money. Also, I was talking to somebody as I came in here and discovered that there are 170,000 derelict or vacant houses around Ireland. Is it that we do not have the expertise? Is it that we do not have the enthusiasm? Is there not the drive? That is the overall question that leads to the others.
Mr. Keyes mentioned land readjustment. That is a tool for building new neighbourhoods. I was delighted to see in my hometown of Naas that there new zoning went through this morning.
The plan came out, and it is right beside the rail track in Sallins. That will make a difference. Regarding the land readjustment, how would that work? How would it lower costs for businesses?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
There is a claim that money is the bottleneck. What I am basing that on is as follows. The financial crisis was a tough period, but in the full horizon of the past 30 years, it did not last that long. We have generally had a lot of money to fund projects. If money is not the bottleneck, what is? We have a few things we would talk about. I have already mentioned consent. That is the idea that stakeholders will find ways to block things if they are not in favour of them.
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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That is NIMBYism.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
It is, but it is not just NIMBYism. It might even be planning authorities. The Government cannot railroad things and determine exactly what is built. Many other people have a say, and especially when it comes to housing. They will find ways to oppose it. We have some ideas for how to get around that. We think it is important that people's views are taken into account.
On infrastructure specifically, I have heard that there are three legs to the stool when it comes to building infrastructure. The first is client capacity. That is what I have been talking about. If the client is not skilled and competent, that cannot be delegated. If the client, that is, the State, is not competent, it cannot hire a consultant or whoever to be competent on its behalf. Only you can represent yourself. Client capacity is critical. The second relates to legals and regulations; the legal side and the permitting side. The third relates to contractors and having a good, rich market for contractors. As we approach our future mega projects and large projects, we must do whatever we can to make sure we have the client capacity and the planning and permitting lined up as best we can in advance. I know work is ongoing in the Dáil at the moment in that regard. We must also encourage contractors to come here and commit, and allow them to see that there is plenty of work, and a pipeline of work, here. Perhaps they will form a consortium with some other people and come together and bid.
I will make another point on bottlenecks. If you look at places that are good at growing, they do not just rely on-----
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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Is Mr. Keyes thinking of places outside Ireland?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Yes. They do not just rely on developers, let us say. Developers are in favour of growth. They make money from it. However, in places that are good at growing, it is not just developers who are in favour of growth. There is a broader coalition in favour of building. In the US, cities raise lots of taxes locally. They are in a coalition with builders to try to attract investment to their locality. They see what is in it for them. Politicians want money to fund their local schools and police services so they see that if someone builds something big in their towns, they can have better schools and police. On that basis, they will go for it. Having that alignment is very important. That is yet another benefit of land readjustment. I am sorry for mentioning it for the ninth time, but it is a theme.
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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It seems that the mindset is totally different. Mr. Keyes mentioned America. I was in Oklahoma a few weeks ago. I attended a basketball game. Oklahoma is putting in a new basketball stadium and spending over €1 billion on it. That is a phenomenal amount. The view of investment is radically different than it is here.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
I think that is so. There is a lot to that. Americans are very comfortable with investment, funding, funding sources and all those sorts of things. They are the world experts at that sort of thing. It is about aligning the powers that be with others so that things can get built. The point about land readjustment is that it is not just for aligning the landowners. It is for giving the local authorities a reason to do it. Local authorities want nice, master-planned communities. They want to money to fund them. Land readjustment gives them a way to sell land so they see the benefit of it. Those are some of the other bottlenecks I have identified beyond money.
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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When Progress Ireland looks at the housing issue as a think tank, it is looking at the numbers and saying they are very manageable? What we did with Covid-19 and what we did for the Ukrainians, where we found 120,000 spaces overnight, means that 17,000 on an emergency accommodation list is fairly small with the witnesses' type of thinking.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Ireland has an opportunity to have the highest living standards in the world. We talk to our friends who work in policy around the world. They are curious about Ireland. When we describe our problems and constraints, and the cards with which we have to play, they cannot get over it. They think we are joking. They say they would love to be in our position. We have an incredibly strong economy. We have great public finances. We have the world's best companies queuing up to invest here. The problem is that it creates its own challenges and it is hard to keep up. However, if we can do it, we will have an amazing economy and all the other advantages. We have beautiful places, great communities and all these things. We just have to learn how to grow faster. The Senator is asking is that doable. It absolutely is. We have done it before in Ireland, although in a narrow window. Other countries have shown how to grow fast. There is a template for how to do it, including some of the stuff we have been talking about, for example, electrified rail and building around it. You can really scale up your building and solve a lot of these problems. There absolutely is an opportunity for us to take.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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I thank our witnesses for joining us.
I would like to touch on balanced regional development. I come from Offaly, in the midlands. It has probably not seen foreign direct investment at the level other counties have enjoyed. Where will the material change occur in order to ensure that we secure such investment for counties like Offaly?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
The bottleneck is transport. Good transport effectively shrinks the distances between places. It would mean Offaly would be integrated with medtech in the west and Dublin in the east. Investment in high-capacity, high-speed transport pays dividends in all sorts of ways. I have talked about capacity and housing, and about the quality of life in communities. Another point is that transport benefits rural areas. It makes places like Offaly easier to invest in than when they rely on a bottleneck motorway or road.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Mr. Keyes mentioned connectivity, accessibility and so on. Does he have any thoughts or views on connectivity from north to south?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
My wife is from the north west, so I spend a lot of time on the road to Donegal. The entire north-west quadrant of Ireland is left behind, and a lot of that is down to the fact that it is not physically connected. It is not connected to Belfast and Dublin, and that makes it difficult to work and invest there. It has a small, localised economy that is not plugged into the wider system, where everyone else is. That is terrible.
The eastern corridor between Dublin and Belfast is a little different. It has massive potential. The two urban centres of the country are relatively close to each other but have poor links. In any other country, you would expect a major spine, with considerable building and economic activity along it. Instead, Belfast and Dublin are like two islands, which is a massive missed opportunity.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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I understand where Mr. Keyes is coming from, but to counter his claim, I believe we would just be adding to existing congestion. It took me two and a half hours to come to Dublin today, whereas it would have taken me 90 minutes a few years ago. Are we not just adding another layer of congestion and development? Should we not consider a north–south approach, through the likes of the midlands, and open up a whole blue ocean?
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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I mean transport, including roads.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Exactly. I am coming to that. You get benefits for drivers in that you are not relying solely on roads as the backbone of your system. Roads are limited, and it is hard to build them at the scale needed. If you invest in a very big and efficient system, all of a sudden road journeys become shorter and congestion is lighter. Places where these investments have been made are better for drivers as well.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Given the master plan, the national planning framework and where we are at in this regard, how does Mr. Keyes envisage investment across the island evolving over the coming years? What sectors does he envisage as being most important at a regional level?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Trying to forecast the future is difficult. However, it looks like electrification is the coming wave. This is not just about replacing internal combustion engines but also about cheap motors and batteries finding their way into everything. There is also demand from AI and data centres. There is therefore a case for saying the places where cheap electricity can be sourced will be on the up. I have heard the case made that the west of Ireland could be well placed in that regard.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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What does Mr. Keyes consider to be cheap electricity?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
That is a scenario I have heard put forward. It would represent a movement of the centre of gravity of the country away from the east coast, where it currently is. On the Deputy’s question on electricity, which I sort of answered, we are building a green electricity system. It needs to be affordable but also needs to be reliable and green. Those are the three things we are trying to get together. The system we are building is going to be green, but I am worried it may not be reliable or affordable. There is something to be said for augmenting the renewable industry we are building with other forms of power to lessen the problems. In this regard, Denmark is an interesting case study. It has the same population and the same level of wealth, and it is also a windy place. It has been a pioneer in wind energy, including offshore wind energy. I think it is still the world leader when it comes to wind energy as a proportion of its energy overall but it recognises the limits of wind energy and what it needs to complement the wind industry infrastructure it has built. Denmark banned nuclear power in 1985 but last year announced a task force to investigate it again. With the development of small modular reactor technology, smaller countries like Denmark and Ireland may have an opportunity to complement the renewable energy infrastructure they are building to resolve the other problems around affordability and reliability.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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I envisage data becoming every bit as important as energy.
What are Mr. Keyes's thoughts on where the data sector is going to go over the next ten years in the context of our development, or will it be developed? Where does Mr. Keyes see that going?
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Considering also what he said about availability, supply, affordability and cheapness of power.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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We will call them large energy users.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Yes. It is not just for large energy users that it is important to have abundant electricity. There is also modern manufacturing and transport where everything is now being electrified at an increasing rate. If we get that abundance of electricity right and if we raise the ambition for electricity generation, then a lot of things will go right, not just with the large energy users locating around the country.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Will Mr. Keyes give an insight into how Progress Ireland's board and its governance were constructed how it was decided what skills and experience were wanted on the board?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
We thought that we would be a forum. When we set up Progress Ireland, we felt that Ireland was missing a little institution like this. We thought that these policies and these ideas needed a hearing. To actually achieve that, to translate these ideas and to get people talking about them, we were going to need to partner with funders and with people in this building here, so we were going to need to demonstrate that we were a serious organisation and a serious operation, not fly-by-night and not just four lads taking a chance. We took our governance very seriously and it took up most of our time for the first year of organising the company. With regard to who we recruited, each person brings complementary skills. Fiona Cormican, for example, was a commercial director for her career and was a builder of social housing-----
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Did Mr. Keyes have a road map in advance or did he just say "I know this guy; I will give him a ring"?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
No. We knew there were different roles we would need. We knew we would need policy expertise, that we would be interfacing with the Civil Service, and we would need building expertise. It was about trying to fill those gaps one by one as we went.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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When will Mr. Keyes decide whether it is a success or has been effective enough in building the next layer on the organisation or possibly making the bigger decisions?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
We are just trying to get these ideas out there and trying to communicate them in a way in order that it is not just someone in this room who is persuaded but that people will talk about them and share them, and that the ideas will travel and not be bottlenecked by the four of us doing our best to bang the drum. The ultimate success would be for people around the country to be talking about what are the other bottlenecks here besides money that are stopping projects from happening, and asking how, if we care about lowering the cost of doing business or the cost of housing, we can we build more stuff that will get this done.
John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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I thank Mr. Keyes.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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I was really interested in the opening statement. I have been following the work the organisation has been doing. I am conscious that although I am the Cathaoirleach of the committee, this is my personal speaking time. I do not know that I would agree with the line of questioning the witnesses experienced earlier and I think it was unfair. The reason is that, ultimately, I feel that it is good to get an organisation in Ireland that is fully focused on getting things done. If we look back through the years, we can see how at times Ireland has excelled, for example, in the building of the national motorway network with Transport 21, before the Celtic tiger came to a devastating end. For some time we got quite good at building infrastructure, but then in that post-recession era we tied ourselves up in knots. I speak about it a lot in this committee and not just because the witnesses are here today.
I often speak about the regulatory hurdles we put in front of ourselves. Last Wednesday I had a meeting with the Taoiseach for about two hours and 40 minutes. Deputy Dolan was with me. We spent a lot of our time discussing with the Taoiseach how we need to get better and faster at delivering what is needed for the country. One thing I referenced was the public spending code. This instrument was put in place to save money but, in reality, it just added six to 12 months onto major capital infrastructure builds. I could go into phase A and B and C, and gate 1, 2 and so on. This is a new language that the Department of public expenditure has invented when it comes to stopping us doing what we need to do.
Given their expertise in their respective fields and that of their organisation, I would love to get the witnesses' feedback on one thing I feel very passionately about, which is the national development plan, NDP. This is the plan that underpins what the Government wants to do in the delivery of infrastructure. It lists out projects and provides a detailed focus on what the State needs and the support the Government will give, even financially. Do the witnesses think there is a further way in which listed projects in the NDP can be fast-tracked through the legislative or regulatory hurdles we have in place right now, including judicial reviews? A body of work is being done by the Minister for justice, Deputy O'Callaghan in respect of that. I am also referring to things the Department of public expenditure does that, unfortunately, I feel get in the way.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
In Ireland, as in other places Governments do best when there is a process to follow that is their natural way of doing things, where there are thought processes, procedures and a following of the plan. In the sorts of domains where that is the right approach, they will do fine. Unfortunately, there are lots of domains that are not like that where you need to rely on a bit of judgment and a bit of nous to actually identify the situation in front of you, make a decision and not follow the process. That is what I would say about it. It is about recognising those situations, whether you are in a domain where you cannot rely on process, and then putting in place decision-making frameworks in those specific circumstances so that people can make calls, make decisions and get things done more quickly. Those are the types of reforms I would be looking at. MetroLink is one example but there are other projects that fit into that framework.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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Absolutely. One of the things in Mr. Keyes's statement also caught my imagination where Progress Ireland's research suggests that an investment of €52 million in having expert staff could yield almost €15 billion in savings. That is something that would catch the public's imagination when it comes to deciding to make the initial investment to save more. I heard a great proverb one time from a Chinese businessman who was in Ireland in the dairy industry. He said that sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards, and Mr. Keyes's statement reminded me of that. Will Mr. Keyes explain that, and perhaps give us the empirical basis for that statement?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
The State has listened to this to an extent. There has been a campaign of introducing more expertise into the system and there has been recognition that maybe consultants are getting too much money from the State. As a way around this, the State has been tooling up. The National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, is the home of these new specialised experts and the State is going to draw on those as a way of saving money on consultants. The additional step that needs to happen is the governance piece where the expertise is not just siloed in the State and brought in as needed but is actually empowered to make decisions.
On the potential €15 billion saving, on a mega project like MetroLink, there is a wide range of potential outcomes. There is no way about it. I chose €15 billion but we could go wider even. We looked at the most expensive projects on a per kilometre basis versus the efficiently built being the cheapest. I narrowed that band a bit to get a sense of how wide the range of potential outcomes is. The key to getting there is with three steps. The first bit is getting the expertise in and delegating control to them so we have a strong client.
There is also the piece about contractors and making sure that we attract a lot of contractors and get a good bidding process. There is also the piece around planning. If we can get those three pieces right, we can be closer to the good outcome where the project costs closer to €11 or €12 billion than costing over €20 billion.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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Absolutely, and yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting the Finnish Parliament's equivalent of this committee, called the "Grand Committee". It was a prelude to Ireland's Presidency of the EU Council that is coming up in the second half of this year. What I found particularly interesting in Finland was its nuclear power. Finland has the same population as Ireland, and it is getting up to 40% of its energy from nuclear power. As a consequence, Finland is averaging out probably as the second lowest of the EU 27 over the past five years in respect of commercial energy prices. In comparison, Ireland, unfortunately, has been up at the highest level of that scale, which has really brought a lot of pain for small business owners in Ireland, for the competitiveness of our economy, and for ordinary households. We are the committee on enterprise, we are here to talk about how we can do business better in Ireland, how we can build infrastructure better as well and make Ireland more competitive generally.
Does Progress Ireland feel that there might be an opportunity for Ireland to do nuclear power or to replicate what Finland did? One thing the Finnish delegation said to us yesterday was that being carbon neutral, etc., which nuclear power obviously is, did not drive on the decision. Rather it was more from a security perspective, and that was very interesting. They wanted to ensure that their economy and country was able to function without having to rely on an unstable neighbour, and that is what drove it on for them. We are an island economy. In a lot of ways, we learned from what happened during the recent unrest and protests that it can be quite a delicate place on occasion. If there were a more substantial conflict in the next number of years, given the way world is going, is nuclear power something we should be urgently looking into?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
Having Russia as a neighbour concentrates the mind, and the Finns have done a lot of things that other places have not had to do for that reason. Their nuclear system is very impressive for a relatively small country. They have big reactors and state-of-the-art storage facilities underground and everything like that. The good thing is that Ireland does not even need to achieve that level of complexity and technical excellence. There are small modular reactors rolling out of factories. One is being installed in Ontario. There are nine countries in the queue to get them next. They are small. We would need several of them in Ireland to make up a meaningful proportion of our energy mix, but we would not need to worry about all of the complexities of building and installing a really complex reactor. The first step is taking it seriously, like the Danes, Estonians and Belgians are doing. It is thinking about what the legislative, regulatory and technical issues are, including what skills we would need and all the other bits and pieces, so that, in ten years' time, we are in a position to this thing that seems like it is well aligned with what we need.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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In relation to the solution for our housing problem, there are two things we have not mentioned, and they are dereliction and land holding. My God, if we ever want an example of that, we should go down to where I am from in Arklow. Arklow is on a crest of a wave. A €3.6 billion data centre is coming. It has planning for between 40 and 60 wind turbines. It has everything, including tourism, going for it, but the heart of the town is rife with dereliction. That did not take place overnight. That has been going on for 25 years and enforcement is an issue. An Taisce were down and did a report that found that Arklow has a dereliction problem. The dogs on the street in Arklow know there is a dereliction problem. I feel it is a huge missed opportunity. We need to try to have a vision of where we want Arklow to be, including housing above shop units. What is going on in Arklow is being replicated in every town, city and village in Ireland. I really feel it is an absolute scourge on the social landscape of a town, but it could also be one of the parts of the solution when it comes to the housing problem. It could be a key part of it. I am interested to hear the witnesses' opinions on that.
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
As the Deputy said, dereliction is a problem in most towns and villages around the country, as well as the cities. There are a few things that are missed. The Government throws a lot of money at this problem, as everyone knows. I have no particular objection to paying for things that are useful such as renovating these properties.
There are two parts to the Deputy's question. One is about enforcement and the other relates to the higher level issue of why there is so much dereliction and what is driving it. To take the latter first, there are a lot of regulatory barriers that make it much harder and much more expensive to renovate properties. One reason there is a lot of vacancy above shops is that people who own the properties know it is a losing opportunity for them to renovate it. One reason for that is older buildings are intrinsically difficult to deal with. That is just a fact of nature. The materials are often different from new builds and so on, so you need more specialist people.
The other issue that does not get discussed enough is that the regulations that apply to new buildings in many circumstances also apply to older ones. For instance, if you are changing use from commercial to residential, which in many cases with above-the-shop development is what you are doing, those regulatory barriers, which are mostly building regulations, do make it much more expensive. That is one thing we need to look at. If we want the money that the State is spending to actually convert into new houses, we have to look at lowering the regulatory barriers so that we do not expect older buildings to behave like new ones. It is an unrealistic hope.
I agree with the Deputy's point on enforcement. If someone is holding a derelict property, it has massive costs on the rest of the town. To put it concretely and to understate a lot of the damage it does, it damages all of the adjoining property values. It also makes towns less attractive and less nice places to live. It has all of these other effects that the Deputy is quite familiar with. We should scale up enforcement action. I do not have anything particularly original to say on that other than to reassert the premise of the Deputy's question which is that we would welcome more enforcement on long-term derelict properties, but with the proviso that we cannot expect private owners to basically pour money into these properties without any expectation of a return. If that is going to be driven by regulation, which in some cases it will and in some cases the State is going to have to step in, we should look at lowering the regulatory barriers.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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On that point, the State has stepped in and there is up to €135,000 available for apartments above properties as well. I feel that there is no excuse. I feel that what is exactly going on is literally land hoarding.
On a separate point, what can we learn from the new children's hospital? We touched on it earlier on. I come from the private sector. I built hotels. In my previous life, I was in hospitality. What has gone on with the children's hospital would not have happened in the private sector or you would have gone bust. Who is accountable for it? What can we learn? Will we see a case study being done on it on how not to do a project?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
A lot of people have looked at it and it seems like they made every mistake in the book. One high level point I would make, and it applies more generally, is that mega projects are different. You cannot scale up the inputs or the amount of money you are putting into a project and expect the outputs to scale up as well. Certain projects are just fundamentally different from the simple ones that we are used to. The thing that the children's hospital has in common with MetroLink, or a software project even, is that you cannot make a plan in advance of what is exactly going to happen and then just follow the recipe. You cannot say there are 148 steps and if we make sure we get the steps right and follow them one by one, we will get it done. For all of these complex projects, the complexity sort of overwhelms the plans you make in advance.
Whether you are building software, a metro or whatever, what ends up being critical is who is making the decisions as you go. In the children's hospital, especially at the start of the project, the people making the decisions were not empowered experts and it was going through normal Civil Service channels. The Civil Service was doing things in its responsible way, the way it always does things, but it was just a bad fit for that domain of a complex project with lots of unexpected things happening and lots of decisions having to be made as you went.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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I understand what Mr. Keyes is saying and that it could have happened in the children's hospital but with MetroLink, it is literally going from A to B. It is going underground and we know the price of the property. That has all been sorted out in advance. My concern is an overrun on MetroLink. How can that not happen?
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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There is a contingency for that in a contract. With with the hospital - I have read into it - they were adjusting a lot of things, what with the requirements of certain departments, but that will not be the case with MetroLink.
Mr. Seán Keyes:
I am told that, with these metro projects, a major decision has to be made once every three or four days, with consequences in the millions of dollars. For example, they may encounter a type of rock that is slightly different than expected. The contractor thinks you could save €11 million if you use a different style, tunnelling technique or mixture of concrete. There are decisions to be made constantly and all the interfaces with the utilities you encounter as you go. That is a consistent thing you hear, namely, that it gets very complex down there and there is no substitute for having the right people-----
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Can we put a price on MetroLink?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
The best you can do is look at the range and at what happened before. We are not going to build as cheaply as the Spanish or the French. They are like the black belts and they can build these things really quickly and cheaply. They have done it before. They have it down to a fine art. We are not going to be as good as them. I hope we are not as bad as the Americans. They are the worst.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Somewhere in between.
Brian Brennan (Wicklow-Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Can we not learn from the Spanish? I thank Mr. Keyes.
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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Mr. Keyes said a couple of times that as soon as you dig underground, you do not know what you are going to face. I was watching the "Prime Time" show about the children's hospital. This started 25 years ago. The punt was still in circulation when we decided to build this. There is a lost generation.
Like Deputy Brennan, my fear is that the MetroLink is going to be the next children's hospital. Before we start, while we are all sober and upright, can we make a decision so that does not happen?
Mr. Keyes mentioned empowered experts. Why can we not be as good as the French and Spanish? He said they were black belts. Can we not get them in to build it? Even while we are starting, Dr. Seán Sweeney has resigned. Before the starting gun went off, he had left the project. What should happen now?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
It seems like the powers that be understand something about this problem. A year ago, the governance setup for the MetroLink was something along the lines of if they were digging in the ground and they found something that would either cost or save more money than expected, they would have to make a decision. The process was the decision would go before the MetroLink project board, the Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, board, the NTA, Department of Transport, the Department of public expenditure and potentially the Cabinet. When tonnes of big decisions were being made all the time, that was a recipe for disaster. In fairness to the Government, it understood that and there is now a plan for streamlined governance with a project body. That body is still being finalised and we are still learning the contours. That is why I am very het up about this question right now because it is in the mixer and is being decided. The Department of public expenditure has yet to sign off on it one way or the other. It is important that this project body and the people in charge of it be given a lot of autonomy, albeit with oversight. Obviously, it is Government money and there needs to be a board over the people in charge of the project. The Departments of Finance and public expenditure need to be on that board, looking over their shoulders and making sure that things are all right. The people who run that project need to be able to sign off on huge spending decisions with massive amounts of taxpayers' money. That is sort of anathema to the way the Civil Service thinks. The way you save money in the long run is by letting people spend it freely. One can understand that is not how the Civil Service thinks about things and it does not work in other domains, but it is the right way to think about it in this domain.
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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In the statement, Mr. Keyes said something about investing in the decision makers so that we did not have to pay long term. I think he mentioned €15 billion. What was he getting at?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
It is just the point that the children's hospital is an example of a mega project that went haywire because the governance was all wrong from the outset and then it was chasing its tail and the whole thing just went crazy. Mega projects are not like ordinary projects. An ordinary project cannot be ten or 15 times over budget but it is possible with mega projects because of the degree of complexity. That €15 billion spread was looking at the spread of how metro projects go. The best are a lot cheaper than the least efficient. Right now, the Government is deciding how the thing is going to be run, who is going to make the decisions, is that going to be the project board or the Department of public expenditure, are the people on the project board going to be Irish or from Spain or the UK, will they have experience, and how much will they be paid. The important thing is to make sure they have done this before. You have to pay them a lot of money by Irish standards - hundreds of thousands of euro - but it is a drop in the ocean relative to the cost of the project.
Aubrey McCarthy (Independent)
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Wearing my advocacy hat regarding homelessness, I like some of Progress Ireland's ideas and they are being adopted by the Cabinet. Deputy Brennan mentioned vacancy and dereliction, which I also mentioned earlier. If there was one practical reform in housing delivery Progress Ireland could introduce to progress housing delivery, what would it be?
Mr. Seán O'Neill McPartlin:
At pains of repeating this point - I am sorry to the members who hear me say this - it is land readjustment. In the Government's plan, Delivering Homes, Building Communities, a lot of the pressure is on urban development zones. These are large-scale projects of which many will be designated this year, I hope. We are relying on that process to deliver in the tens of thousands of homes. Land readjustment will make that process cheaper form the point of view of the Exchequer. We will be able to deliver the infrastructure by using the land values and not having to rely on the fiscal outlook of the State. One problem is if there is fiscal contraction, sometimes for reasons outside of our control like an external shock. If your process of delivering homes is very reliant on the Exchequer, all of that development will stop. We saw that happen before. That is one reason we are very keen on land readjustment. We want these projects to continue to deliver even if there is a contraction of the budget at Cabinet level.
Urban development zones are important. We are happy to see they being pushed forward. Enabling them is the next important step for the Government.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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I am intrigued hearing the responses. It is fascinating. To summarise it in a bit of a flippant way, the Department of public expenditure reminds me of a baby refusing to give up the bottle. Perhaps we need to develop an architecture within the State that enables delivery boards to have complete autonomy to do what needs to be done.
There was a reference to whether people were Irish or not and international expertise.
For the public in general, if someone from Mars was sitting there, as long this is delivered on time and on budget, they do not care. That is what they want to see happen. What is interesting is that we spoke a lot about Japan. A committee delegation travelled to Japan in the past six months. We were there last September. In a lot of democracies as well as the autocratic countries in Asia, a lot of which are experiencing significant economic growth, etc., the common law does not come into it regarding the whole argument of the public good versus that of the individual rights of the landowner. We have been so hung up on that in Ireland for so long that it has cost the economy here in the high tens of billions of euro if we look at it over a 20- or 30-year window. It is an enormous shame.
We have spoken a lot about physical infrastructure. I ask the witnesses to outline in the limited time left what they feel that we need in terms of social infrastructure at a government level. They spoke very eloquently around that magic dance between the different State agencies and the local authority. God forbid, something ends up having to be discussed at Cabinet level and having to rectify and correct mistakes and try to get things through all the phases that we need to travel through to make them happen. Often, that suffocates what needs to be done.
I do not want to go too abstract with this, but I will bring it back to the national development plan. Why not have a special designation for projects that the Government has decided? The Government that was formed under the rules of our Constitution after a general election and the Taoiseach was elected and appoints a government. We have a coalition Government now in Ireland. That NPD is there on behalf of the people of the country. Do the witnesses feel that needs to have a lot more weight in our judicial system or on a legislative basis that it has the capacity for the projects contained within it to be streamlined and fast tracked?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
On the point around common law, one of the reasons that policy nerds are quite excited about UDZs is that they are a departure from our standard way of doing planning. They are about building big communities at scale. From a planning application perspective, they are specific. On paper, a UDZ is like let us imagine what this new neighbourhood looks like, lay it out very specifically and clearly and here is exactly what one can build there. It takes a lot of that risk, uncertainty and decision-making out of the system which is what we have in our planning system which seems to be a downstream of common law heritage. Having this specificity around UDZs and bolting on other specific rules, land readjustment we have heard lots about it, but it is the first cause of UDZs, that can be beneficial to the country.
On social infrastructure, a lot of what I am excited about is that I lived in Denmark for a while. That is a place that has got a lot of lovely features but the urban forum there is a nice level of density. It has got a lovely life at ground level. It is a lovely atmosphere. There are people out with their kids on the street corners. There are small businesses and all of that. There is no problem there with their social infrastructure. They know each other. They do not have long commutes. We can see that there are happy families who live there. That is downstream of their urban forum and of the transport system that enables the urban forum. It is about if we can get this right and think a bit bigger about how we plan our transport and housing with the electrified rail, UDZ plus land readjustment, we build lots of houses, lower housing costs and lower the cost of doing business. That is all good. However, as a bonus, we get naturally walkable communities with life at street level and people who bump into each other and know each other. The other path for Ireland to build loads of homes is to build three more ring roads around every major city and have long drives.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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Death by congestion.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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That is interesting. I do not want to go too much over my time. Regarding the social infrastructure, we are lacking in our personnel capacity. Coming back to what Mr. Keyes said in relation to having that decision to be taken about hiring in the internal expertise, does he think the Government is working as fast as it needs to to address the challenges? Given the population growth that we are set to have in Ireland, even in my own area, it is going to deliver about 60% of new housing growth in Cork county in the east Cork corridor. We spoke about Midleton and all the areas that I represent. Does Mr. Keyes think the Government is moving at a pace that it needs to?
Mr. Seán Keyes:
In my opening statement, I set out a few charts. They are almost contradictory. One of them said that Ireland has the second fewest dwellings per capita in Europe. Another said that in 2024 Ireland built more homes per 1,000 residents than the 20 countries in Europe that we can get data on. What is going on there? We are building more than most places, but we are still not building anywhere near enough or fast enough. It is, again, downstream of our success. There is a massive demand to live and invest here. Even though we are building more than most places and it is hard to grow fast, we have got to go faster. We have got to look at other places that have managed to ramp it up or other times in history where countries have been able to really ramp up and build at scale. If we kept going with that mindset, it is very doable.
James O'Connor (Cork East, Fianna Fail)
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I encourage Mr. Keyes to do one thing. Often in politics, it is very good to be able to say to somebody the opportunity cost of not acting and calculating financially how much it is costing the people and the taxpayer, etc. The metro example is fantastic. I would love to see a little bit more. I really feel for the organisation. The political system as a whole in Ireland would probably appreciate that. I hope we have not been too critical as civil servants here today. I often find that fast setting in the public service in Ireland when one speaks to public servants. That frustration is not always the case that it is across the entire system. There are often lots of elements within the public service that know precisely what needs to be done, but often what happens is that they cannot get that authorisation or cannot get access to funding.
On the subject of having multi-annual funding in capital builds where it is needed, it is a conversation that is just not allowed to happen. It is in the programme for Government. I did a lot of work specifically on road transport. If someone is building or doing road maintenance in Ireland, everything is being done in seven- or eight-month windows within weather cycles that allow road maintenance work to be done. If we able to say to contractors that they could bid for three- or four-years’ work, they would bring it in at dozens lower percentiles of cost than they will if they have to tender for it each and every year and do not have that capacity to forward plan. That is something that we just do not do in Ireland. It is so bloody frustrating.
I thank our witnesses for their contributions to the meeting, which has been very useful when we come to consider our draft report. I thank our committee staff for their assistance and help.