Ireland has been living beyond its means for far too long

Today, an Irish election takes place which has seen parties from the left, right, and centre seek to outbid each other in making extravagant electoral promises. 

While Irish government over-spending on vanity projects is nothing new, recently public service profligacy has risen to entirely new heights. €350,000 was forked out on a bicycle shed for parliamentarians. It seems it won’t even protect their bicycles from that most common form of Irish weather: rain. 

A children’s hospital that was scheduled to cost €650,000 is now running at €2.2 billion, and it’s still not finished. And the daddy of them all, a proposed metro link from Dublin airport to the city centre is currently estimated to cost between €2.3 billion and €9.5 billion – what could possibly go wrong? Its opponents fear that the true costs of this infrastructure project could end up making HS2 look like a model of financial planning and probity by comparison.