€240m road cutbacks are ‘folly’ when road building has never been cheaper – O’Dowd

[DaveM]

[/list]You may have heard of Sisk.

You may have heard of Sisk.

You may have heard of Sisk.

Congratulations for putting such a high number of cliched notions into such a short post.

Just on a point of information, whereas John Sisks are the biggest building and civil engineering company in the country they have not been at the forefront of roads building.

The main Irish players in this sector would probably be SIAC, Roadbridge and Ascon. However on the bigger contracts they have often needed to team up with bigger companies from outside the state. An example is SIAC's joint venture with the Spanish company Ferrovial for the M4 Kinnegad, M3 Kells and M50 Phase 1 projects. Therefore if we look to boost the economy with large scale projects then it is true to say that a lot of this money will leave the country as you'll see hungry contractors from all over Europe looking for a cut of the action. It's not like the US where any roads (or any other public works project for that matter) project (or any other public works project for that matter) is likely to be predominatly tendered for by US firms or US subsidiaries of foreign firms. That's not to say we should slash capital spending as the benefits of building needed infrastructure (not vanity projects) run a lot deeper than simply the home country of the building contractor.

FG's statement is pretty vacuous to be honest. By the end of 2010 Dublin will be linked to Belfast, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford with continuous motorway. In addition the M50 will be fully upgraded and both Limerick and Waterford will be bypassed. Our roads network used to be terrible. Now it's not that bad. Ask yourself, what's left to do? One is the completion of the N11 Dublin - Rosslare route but, safety issues between Rathnew and Arklow aside, this road is hardly creaking at the seams. The other is the upgrading of outstanding sections the N25/N20/N18 Waterford - Cork - Limerick - Galway route. There is quite a lot to be done on these routes but it's not as if we're not already spending big money on them and that is set to continue.

There was always going to be a fall off in spending on roads one the inter-urban motorways from Dublin were completed. The emphasis on spending now must shift to rail as if we don't complement the roads with adequate public transport infrastructure they'll simply clog up with commuters who shouldn't be on them in the first place. The Dart Interconnector should be priority number one and needs to start now. The government should commit to Metro North and West even if it's 2020 by the time they're finished. We need them. I also think that Luas type systems should be looked at for Cork and Galway. They'd certainly make more sense than wasting money on the western rail corridor sections up to Sligo.

[jfk2008]

Contracts like this have to be put out to EU tender, and awarded based on strict criteria. The Government can't just give the contract to SISK.

I know that. I was using Sisk as an example to show that his claims that contracts would be automatically awarded to Gama or its equivalents are false.

[DaveM]

I know that. I was using Sisk as an example to show that his claims that contracts would be automatically awarded to Gama or its equivalents are false.

It's not a given that they would go to foreign contractors but when projects reach a certain size there is a limited pool of Irish companies who are able to compete for them independently. Recent experience of major projects on both road and rail infrastructure are evidence of this so we must deal in practicalities.

[jfk2008]

FG's statement is pretty vacuous to be honest. By the end of 2010 Dublin will be linked to Belfast, Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford with continuous motorway. In addition the M50 will be fully upgraded and both Limerick and Waterford will be bypassed. Our roads network used to be terrible. Now it's not that bad. Ask yourself, what's left to do? One is the completion of the N11 Dublin - Rosslare route but, safety issues between Rathnew and Arklow aside, this road is hardly creaking at the seams. The other is the upgrading of outstanding sections the N25/N20/N18 Waterford - Cork - Limerick - Galway route. There is quite a lot to be done on these routes but it's not as if we're not already spending big money on them and that is set to continue.

There's little or no money being spent on the N20 route and sections of the N24 could also do with major upgrading as could sections of the N2 and we need to eliminate bottlenecks like Claregalway on the N17 and similar bottlenecks onother routes.

The majority of our national secondary and regional roads are in a terrible condition.

Smaller-scale improvement projects, at key locations around the country, would provide a stimulus to local economies, improve transport times (hence productivity and investment) and would be unlikely to attract the type of 'hungry contractors' that motorway projects would.

People forget that road-traffic accidents, often contributed to by poor roads, cost Ireland 10s of millions of euros every year.

If we offset the money saved through increased road safety against the cost of improving roads, then the net cost would be much smaller than €240 million.

[YellowRedGreen]

I was beginning to think that maybe you are a shareholder in Sisk. We are still ring-fencing a large amount of funding for capital projects, in excess of what other countries are spending as part of their keynsian stimuli. When I began studying economics in 1987 the first thing Dessie Norton told us was that in small open economies there is little or no Keynsian multiplier effect. We are not spending money on capital projects for that effect but really to catch up with other countries of a similar size. Some small downward adjustment of the capital budget particularly in identifying projects with no proven cost benefit analysis case should and will be dropped over the next few years as we don't want to load all the burden on cutting current expenditure and raising taxes. It will come to pass as sure as day follows night...