Festive rush is nowhere in sight at Leinster House
’Twas the week before Christmas, and all through Leinster House… In most houses it’s a busy enough time of year, with the last-minute shopping and stockpiling of festive snacks, writes Gavan Reilly.
In Leinster House, it’s often the busiest time of year, with a last-minute legislative rush to get various proposals rushed through and sent onward to the President for signing.
If there is to be such a rush this Christmas, it’ll be a bolt from the blue.
Since taking office in January, the coalition has been strikingly idle: whereas there would usually be up to 50 different laws passed in a calendar year, the number at the start of December was merely 12.
The first of those, apparently a priority, allowed the appointment of extra junior ministers — not that increasing the number of ministers appears to have made the government any more productive.
This may seem like a superficial analysis of how a government is doing – the buoyant public finances would tell a different story of national performance — but it’s an important metric if you consider the blueprint that the government has set out, for itself, to get the country moving again.
The infrastructure plan published earlier this month is, in essence, a package of new laws.
One crucial aspect, for example, is that the Oireachtas will have the power to declare certain projects “critical infrastructure” which can therefore be safeguarded from other legal challenges.
Whether that designation can work retroactively isn’t clear, but if it could, MetroLink would surely benefit from that stipulation.
That ought to mean a legislative rush to get the plan over the line… but it doesn’t.
The legislative pipeline is like a drain that’s been dry for too long in the autumn; it’s so full of leaves and debris that it clogs up as soon as any relatively small challenge emerges.
The same is true for the other major plank of the plan, codifying the existing law on judicial challenges so that lawmakers, and not judges, can decide their overall parameters.
Given that judicial reviews are now the bogeyman (God forbid people would like to ensure that laws are correctly followed!), one would imagine a certain urgency to get this done.
While bills like this are complex and need time to be drafted, there isn’t even a timetable for when it might be ready for debate, or when it could be passed on to the statute books.
Perhaps the point is that judicial reviews aren’t actually the albatross the government makes them out to be — and there are other factors that result in these projects being tied up in knots.
Here’s an example: last month planning permission was granted for 800 new homes in Adamstown, near Lucan in west Dublin.
The approval was partly motivated by the idea that, by the time of construction, the area will be well served by the DART+ South West project, entailing major upgrades of existing commuter rail services.
The very day before this planning decision was announced, the government published the Sectoral Investment Plan for Transport, committing €22bn in capital spending over five years… and delaying that very same development.
DART+ South West has already cleared the planning process, and possesses a railway order… yet there is no sign of a tender being issued and construction may only have begun in five years’ time.
Houses are literally being built on the premise of transport links that, purely through government stasis, are not being built.
MetroLink would surely benefit from 'critical infrastructure' status
Similar delays by stealth have pushed back the Luas to Finglas, a rail link to Navan and more.
Judicial reviews and legislative delays aren’t the only things holding up the country’s infrastructure: sometimes it’s literally just ministers not having the impetus to push things along.
Thanks for reading the column this year; I wish you a restful Christmas break and a prosperous New Year. We might all wish the same for those who run the country.
