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.
Irish political leaders are extremely concerned that the incoming US President could kill the golden goose
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.
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