Gavan Reilly: Sorry, Taoiseach: your new big Plan IS a wish list

It was amusing hearing ministers in Cork yesterday (Monday) trying to insist the new National Development Plan was not merely “a wish list”. It literally is: it’s a list of projects the Government would like to do, many of them uncontested, with no idea of deliverability. Publishing a list of roads or public transport projects which are “subject to further approvals” is almost the literal definition of a wish list.

The thing to remember about these National Development Plans is that they are merely a summary of the capital spending plans of the next ten years. The headline figures you’ll see reported - €117 billion in the last version three years ago, €165 billion now - are all of those budgets added up. The €35 billion figure touted for transport is simply the next ten years of transport capital budgets added together (for context, the transport budget for 2021 was €2.5 billion). Would that €35 billion pay for all the transport projects listed in the document? Not a chance.

But these plans aren’t even meant to pay for all the things they’re outlining. Project Ireland 2040 was a plan for 23 years, but only dealt with funding for the first ten. This allowed the then-Government to announce four extended Luas lines, without having a clue when they’d be

delivered or how they’d be paid for. Once the sod was being turned after 2027, it was beyond the horizon and didn’t have to be worried about.

The same is true now. We know what each Department can spend in the next decade but not what many of the projects will cost. Will a Navan rail line be included? We don’t know. What will it cost? We don’t know. When will it be delivered? Nobody could possibly say. And yet, next week, the Government will label opposition budgets as uncosted…

Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent for Virgin Media News and Political Columnist for the Meath Chronicle