It’s Autumn and days shorten. Fruit ripens, and in Ireland a once-off Apple windfall drops. An embarrassment of riches, perhaps, but there it is.

You could do a lot with €14billion and the Government is getting plenty of advice.

But some people look at the cost of a bicycle rack in Dail Eireann and despair. Almost €340,000? To corral 18 bikes?!? You could do a lot with that too.

Everyone’s embarrassed... again.

But this, and the National Children’s Hospital, and every other bloody piece of overpriced and long-delayed public infrastructure, is the end point of a process that’s supposed to deliver all this stuff at competitive rates, on time and without insider trading or other corruption.

There’s a strict formula. Would-be contractors have to compete for the job and the best bid wins.
This is usually, though not necessarily, the lowest-priced.

But if that’s the case, how does a bike rack cost €19,000 per bike? It is astonishing stuff…

LOST IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Next, the news drops that An Bord Pleanála has granted permission for the controversial development between Moore Street and O’Connell Street in Dublin to go ahead.

Jaysus, it’s only 50 years in the pipeline. What’s the rush?

Over the years we’ve had a major eyesore in what should be a grand boulevard but is now a swamp of rubbish, tat, gloom and drugs.

Scrolling back through the years, it has recurred in reports and plans and strategies, and reports and plans and strategies, and so on and on and on. Meanwhile, key infrastructural developments become generational problems, as easy individual local bits and pieces are completed but the knotty parts remain undone, sometimes for decades.

Why does it take so long to get anything done here? And how does the cost balloon beyond belief, to a Twilight Zone where reason and value for money spiral and warp in a bizarre Irish planning space time all its own?
Just watch what happens if Metrolink actually gets the go-ahead.

In fact, let’s start almost two decades ago. That’s when, according to a recent letter to the Irish Times by Donal O’Brolcáin, €25million was spent on a station box under the Mater Hospital for the “now abandoned” Metro North.
Instead of using this, MetroLink, the rebrand set to replace Metro North, will do away with a small public park for a station near the Mater (and Mountoy).

O’Brolcáin adds that “the Metro North project team bought a property adjoining Drumcondra station to create an interchange point serving Croke Park and the many bus routes going through Drumcondra.”

Apparently that’s to be abandoned as well. Instead, Metrolink will have a new station, nearer Phibsboro.

And people wonder how the cost of the National Children’s Hospital could almost triple, since 2017. The answer’s easy. It’s lost in the Twilight Zone!!

We’re not saying the intent is anything but admirable. Those in charge of planning are intelligent people. So the problem must lie in the execution, in the system, the culture, the black holes between policy and implementation.

THE RUMSFELD MATRIX

For example, ask yourself this: how did it happen that billions were spent on the M50, and all its connections – Dublin Airport car parks, Terminal 2 and the M1 motorway from Whitehall to Belfast – without including a high-speed rail line along the route?

From Belfast to Cork, it could have served Dublin airport, as well as new satellite stations on the M50 and on to the west and south, reserving the coastal rail line for commuters and local traffic.

Think of the huge reductions in airport driven traffic on the M50 and M1.

The cynics up here on Hog Hill can’t believe it wasn’t mooted. They figure somebody in the planning cycle said “Oh jaysus, don’t start on that – whatever chance we have of completing this, we’ll never get there if we bring in rail.” Or words to that effect.

Whatever the truth of it, a once-in-a-century opportunity was blown. Down the black hole.

In fairness, we do many things very well indeed, especially the small stuff of which much of human life consists.

But when it comes to the macroscopic, the big stuff like infrastructure, housing, health, transport, energy and climate change, there are far too many proclamations and launches of grand strategies and too little propulsive action.

Once the big plan goes down the line, it’s met with inertia, risk aversion and indecisiveness, a lack of urgency and ambition: by caution, fear and a lack of communication.

And dealing with objections takes a lifetime.

Whatever about the politicians, and many are as frustrated as the voters, you have to dig deep to reach an enterprise or innovation mindset or skillset in our national and local administrations.

The notion that State officials should manage and be managed like private sector executives was introduced 30 years ago, under the moniker The Strategic Management Initiative, by then-Taoiseach Albert Reynolds.

It didn’t quite disappear into the black hole. But it was captured just as surely and its focus on enterprise, problem-solving and greater efficiency was eroded, to be replaced by annual plans and performance management largely based on lists of objectives, actions and, especially, boxes to be ticked.

There can also be a sclerotic attachment to the known, to expertise that’s rooted in what has happened rather than what’s about to happen, to the immediate, short-term and pragmatic, rather than the long-term and strategic.

What’s sometimes called the Rumsfeld Matrix was elaborated in a speech by then US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He spoke of known knowns, known unknowns and finally unknown unknowns, that is, “the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

With apologies to Leo Szilard, a key figure in the development of nuclear energy (played by Máté Haumann in Oppenheimer) and to Richard Flanagan who profiles him in his latest opus Question 7, our big plans are based on the little that’s known rather than the greater sum of what isn’t.

And they’re shaped by those who mainly know what can’t be done rather than what’s possible.

CULTURE OF FIXED IDEAS

That isn’t sufficient. Imagination, creativity, enterprise and energy are essential if we’re to effectively tackle the existential challenges we face.

We need to further develop our flexibility and our capacity to adapt at speed. It can be done: look at the response to Covid, when new vaccines were developed and distributed in a very short time.

Such technological development is happening all around us and in every field, but you’d never know that from the turgid discourse and policy drift.

But the Covid crisis also revealed how orthodoxy and autocracy can eventually grind down innovators. Enterprises understand this. They are much less likely to waste weeks and months building grand strategies and big dossiers of objectives.

Instead, they’ll have strategic direction, knowing where they’re headed but not locked into ideas and objectives that are dating as soon as they are named and numbered.

Take climate change. There are many fascinating developments emerging around the world, especially in places where there isn’t a deeply embedded culture of fixed ideas and opposition to new thinking.

So, how do we change our game-plan to achieve this?

It’s time to break the logjam.

• The Hog