Whenever a big development in Ireland stalls or when the Government wants to signal it is “open for business”, the blame for all our woes is laid at the feet of environmental regulation. Last week, the Government’s Infrastructure Taskforce chairman Sean O’Driscoll warned in The Irish Times that Ireland has “gone to extremes on environmental impact assessment” and that our “gold-plated” environmental laws are being “weaponised” against big infrastructure schemes. Not for the first time, the public is being warned the only path to national progress is to sidestep the rigorous environmental assessments required by EU directives.

But delays, overruns and logjams are not caused by over-regulation. Instead they are caused by a profound and systemic failure of strategic planning and a highly reactive administrative state. There has also been a lack of serious political commitment over many decades to bridging Ireland’s infrastructure deficits in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Many of the delays in delivering large projects are directly related to Ireland’s boom and bust economic model, not environmental over-regulation. We are still living under the long shadow of the financial crash of 2008-11, which resulted in the collapse of the Irish State’s capacity to conceive, fund and execute complex long-term infrastructure projects.........

© The Irish Times