An Bord Pleanala will commence an oral hearing on the Metrolink underground rail project on 19 February at Dublin’s Gresham Hotel. The project is so large that it concerns every prospective requirement for public capital in the country – if Metrolink goes ahead, especially if it overshoots the huge budget, there will be a squeeze on projects elsewhere, unless you believe that scarcity has been abolished and that there is no longer any competition for resources.

The project promoters are an agency of the Department of Transport called TII, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, and its latest estimate for the capital cost is €11.9bn. This would fund a 19km rail line called a metro, which is halfway between a tram and a suburban railway, mostly underground, from Dublin city centre to just beyond Swords. This would be the largest capital project ever contemplated in Ireland. The upfront cost is roughly the kind of money the State has been able to spend annually on the entire public capital programme for the whole country in recent years, covering all the roads, housing, hospitals, schools and every other item of State investment. Metrolink would also require ongoing operating subsidies, since fare revenue would not cover outgoings.

The Metrolink scheme in various versions has been around for so long that people may have forgotten how it ever won a place on the policy agenda. The earliest proposal for underground railways in Dublin dates from a report published in 1975, almost 50 years ago, called the Dublin Rail Rapid Transit Study. Successive Governments have declined to build any of the lines proposed, essentially because of the enormous cost of retrofitting underground railways in built-up areas and the limited patronage likely to be attracted in the low-density sprawl which Ireland’s capital has become. There are good reasons why these schemes have not gone ahead.

TII’s latest case for Metrolink received extensive criticism in a review from MPAG, the Major Projects Advisory Group, which thinks there are serious risks of an overshoot and that the maximum figure could be double TII’s estimate, on the wrong side of €23bn. Unless you think all large numbers are equal or don’t care about overshoots, the cost of Metrolink is so enormous that the scheme would need to offer indisputable benefits to offset these cost figures.

MPAG is an offshoot of the Department of Public Expenditure, whose remit is to keep the lid on public spending and whose doctrines include an aversion to overshoots on capital projects. It is currently seeking explanations, as are Oireachtas committees, for the debacle at the National Children’s Hospital, likely to cost about €2.2bn, more than three times the budget allocated by Government. This is the same Government department which fought a losing battle over the €2bn (and counting) National Broadband Plan, sponsored by the Department of Communications. It even went public, its then secretary general Robert Watt describing the economic evaluation of the broadband plan as ‘not credible’. The evaluation had been commissioned by the project promoters, the Department of Communications, from PWC, a well-known firm of accountants. It has become standard practice in Ireland for the promoters of large capital projects, typically State agencies, to both champion the projects and to commission and pay for the evaluation, usually from one of the Big Four accountancy firms. They are thus permitted to mark their own homework and no accountancy firm has to my knowledge recommended against the project they have been asked, by the project champions, to evaluate.