“We’re playing Russian Roulette with our economy and society” with Sean O'Driscoll, Chair of the Economic & Social Research Institute (ESRI) & former Chair / Chief Executive of the Glen Dimplex Group

Greg Dilger: Hello and, uh, welcome to another episode of the Renatus Podcast. My name is Greg Dilger and I'm delighted to be joined today by Sean o', Driscoll, the former chairman and CEO of Glenn Dimplex, one of Ireland's great business success stories these days. Sean chairs both the ESRI and UCC's governing authority and is a member of the Government Accelerating Infrastructure Task Force. Obviously we could do a very interesting podcast on Sean's business career and maybe we'll do that someday, but it's the Infrastructure Task Force we want to talk about now. Before we start, Sean, I'd like to sort of say fair dues to you on, um, joining the task force. I'm sure it's very easy to say no to that sort of an offer. And you said yes. That's to be commended. Why did you say yes this time? Likely. We know task horses have got a kind of a bad name and talking shops, all that type of thing. Why did you say yes to this one?

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, firstly, Ireland has an infrastructure crisis. It didn't happen yesterday or today. This has been going on for probably the last two decades, certainly since the financial crash. And I've been speaking about it. When I was asked, you don't then run for cover. Uh, you have to stand up and man up. And the ultimate reason why I said yes was when I was asked, I had three conditions. The first one was that it had to be radical. This had to get to the heart of the issues. There was no tinkering. This had to be absolutely radical. That was the first task. The second one was that it had to be an action plan, not a report of recommendations. I certainly had no desire for my name to be in a booklet gathering dust in perpetuity and nothing being done about it. So it was very, very clear. This had to be an action plan as distinct from a series of recommendations, and the actions had to be timelined and there had to be accountability against each of the actions. What I mean by accountability is not across government or state agencies. These had to be named departments and named individuals within the departments. And I'm specifically referring there to the minister of a department and the Secretary General of a department. And the third one was that it had to be a government approved action plan, not a task force action plan. Because I had seen back in 2012 when I was involved in the action plan for jobs back in 2012, when we had lost 300,000 jobs during the financial crash and the government of the day under Taoisek Endakeni, Minister Richard Bruton launched an action plan for jobs. And I was one of six industry members who was asked to join in that. And I saw firsthand how, uh, when the Taoiseach, when a minister and when the state mechanism decides we have no other option, things get done. And that's why I went. My third ask was this had to be a government approved action plan and then we could go to work on it.

Greg Dilger: I can only imagine for the government to actually have a task force in the first place is a recognition that we have a serious problem. There's no doubt about that.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, we have a serious problem and you have to actually divide the problem into two. The first one is we never planned for our economic success or the growth in our population. And we've also been hamstrung. Like, we've suffered what I would regard as the biggest hangover of any developed country after the financial crash. We're still suffering that hangover and we're still reliving it. So we're hamstrung by that. But we have a huge infrastructure deficit because in the first sign of an economic downturn, governments have a history in Ireland of cutting what's easy, that is capital expenditure. They will never go to current expenditure first because it's the most politically difficult one. But we caught and we caught and we caught capital expenditure. And we've ended up where the IMF are saying that our infrastructure deficit is 32% relative to a corresponding benchmark that they have of similarly developed countries. We never planned for our economic growth. The action plan for jobs that I referred to earlier, that had a target in 2012, the target was to create 200,000 jobs before between 2012 and 2020. And yet between 2012 and 2025 we created 1.1 million jobs. Secondly, our population since 2015 has increased by 750,000 people and, uh, will increase by a similar figure between now and 2035. So between 2015 and 2035, our population will have increased by a third and our infrastructure hasn't kept pace with that. You just look around, you sit in your car, look at our housing crisis, and that's the first thing. We have a huge historical deficit. Allied to that is the way we have hamstring ourselves. And this is where the task force came in. And this is, um, on the delivery of infrastructure. The timescale to deliver large infrastructure projects in Ireland has doubled over the last 20 years. The reasons are many and multiple. They were set out in a public consultation document that we published back in July. And the issue has many parents and it's everything from um, civil servants who are risk averse, politicians who won't take the hard decisions, right through state agencies that are just delaying and delaying and delaying the rollout of infrastructure. And I'll give you an example of that. We've all heard about the great Dublin drainage system which has been held up in judicial reviews for decade and planning issues, et cetera. And it's now true that but it will take ishke Erin will have to engage with 21 state agencies to get licenses and permits before they can put a shovel in the ground. And these permits aren't done concurrently, they're done sequentially. And they estimate that it will take them up to four years to get the required permits and licenses.

Greg Dilger: Are you talking European as well as local?

Sean O'Driscoll: No, these are all local.

Greg Dilger: All local.

Sean O'Driscoll: These are all local. This is our own handiwork. And every month that, that Greater Dublin drainage is delayed by costs the taxpayer. 5 million every month. Uh, and then we wonder why our infrastructure is so much over the initial, uh, projected costs. So we've tied ourselves up.

Greg Dilger: Obviously time is going to be money. But if it's double the time, is it double the money?

Sean O'Driscoll: It would be double the money, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Simple equation. If inflation runs at 7%, it's doubled in a decade. And certainly inflation post Covid in this sector was like in single digits. In fact it was much higher at some stages over a decade. Certainly it would double in price.

Greg Dilger: Sean, just in terms of the international kind of reference points, because we know it's bad, we're not happy with it and hence all of this. But compared to other countries, have you any data? I remember seeing something about a draghi report where we were really bad on infrastructure for renewable, uh, energy. I think we were at bottom of the pile there. Are there other countries that are of similar sort of scale to us that are miles better than us? And why are they so much better?

Sean O'Driscoll: If you look at the gold standard for competitiveness of economies, and that is the IMD competitiveness index and that benchmarks 69 countries of equal development to Ireland. And in 2024 we were the second most competitive economy of the 69. Sorry, in 2023, I beg your pardon, 2024 we had fallen to fourth. 2025, we'd fallen to seventh. Now, if that's not concerning enough, if you drill down into the detail and you look at basic infrastructure, Basic infrastructure is defined as transport, uh, water and energy.

Greg Dilger: No housing in there.

Sean O'Driscoll: No housing in there. In 2023 we were 29th out of 69. In 2024, we were 38th out of 69. And last year we were 44 out of 69. That's the trajectory that we're going on. And we are playing Russian roulette with our economy and with our society. So if I look at the societal one first, and this is where the work of the ESRI is so important, every developed society, the citizens of a developed society have an unwritten understanding that the state will deliver for them. And, uh, that's an inherent understanding because they're giving up the freedoms, they're being taxed. They have to abide by certain laws, rules and regulations, et cetera. And that's done on the basis that the state will look after them and provide them with their basic requirements. But housing is a basic requirement, and as a country, we are not doing that. And that opens up opportunities for populists. Populists feast on ineffective government, and they also come up with simple solutions to complex problems. And people like to hear the simple solutions without understanding the complex problems. And that's where the problems really start. So our government, our state, has a societal pact with all of its citizens to deliver basic infrastructure, housing, and we're not doing that currently.

Greg Dilger: I don't think too many people would disagree with you on that.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, I hope they wouldn't, because that's the reality. But we, again, as a country, we kick the can down the road.

Greg Dilger: Yeah, yeah.

Sean O'Driscoll: And one day the can hits a stone and bounces back and hits you in the face.

Greg Dilger: Well, uh, I guess with the water thing a few years ago, the charges and there was an attempt to do things differently, and that got kicked down the road for, you know, political reasons, I guess, you know.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, you use a very interesting example there, Greg. I can tell you for a fact as we sit here today, there is not sufficient water in north County Dublin or sufficient electricity in north County Dublin to service the housing plans for the next decade. They don't exist. And when you hear of tens of thousands of houses that are required, and North Dublin is one of the areas that has been identified for a lot of these homes. Today, the infrastructure on freshwater, wastewater or electricity doesn't exist to service those homes. And again, most people won't be aware of this, but three years ago, the then government had to introduce emergency legislation for three gas turbine generating stations because we were about to run out of electricity. And it was done quietly, but emergency legislation was introduced. Now, we all know what happened in October 2014 in the right to Water campaign. And that was around charging for water. Can you imagine what would happen if you turned on your tap and there was no water, what the outcry would be? And that's the scenario we're looking at unless we get to grips with delivery of our infrastructure immediately.

Greg Dilger: Sean, can I talk to you about the risk aversion thing you alluded to earlier on within the sort of the system and perhaps and I can see why the financial crisis would have spooked people. They're all saving money at that time and we forgot to get back to normal and that seems to be the case at the moment. There are lots of things you can fix and we talk about judicial reviews and things like that. But risk aversion is a cultural kind of thing. How do we go about fixing that if the people in situ are baked into them to be conservative and perhaps not bold or brave enough? How do we change that?

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, when I was asked uh, first to participate in the task force, I uh, made my views on the Department of Public Expenditure known to Minister Chambers, but also to senior officials. And I refer to it as a department that says no to most things. It's hardwired into their DNA to be blockers. And I genuinely felt it was the wrong department to put the infrastructure unit into for those very reasons. The risk averse because like everything in life go back to the banking crisis, uh, we hadn't enough regulation and then the way to compensate for it is you dramatically overregulate and over a period of time the pendulum should come back into balance. It hasn't when it comes to infrastructure and um, expenditure and infrastructure. So you had the nonsensical situation up to the last quarter of 2025 where Ishka Ehren who are doing multi year projects were funded on a year to year basis. Now uh, you cannot build infrastructure like that not knowing whether or not you'll have the financial capital that you require for years, two years, three. And indeed no self respecting contractor will enter into a contract on that basis.

Greg Dilger: And presumably Sean, is that just the government cycle, the short term that a government have, they think short term rather than longer term is that.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well it's interesting the ESB is able to do multi year funding of projects because, because it had capital on its own balance sheet. Air grid similarly can do it. But Ishgay Erin didn't um, have that capacity to do it. Now that's changed. The second thing is Ishga Erin are uh, saying that the North Dublin drainage, you're looking at 2028 to start that project. But you have to start procurement now because this is specialist equipment that lots of other countries are looking for. So you have to get your orders into the pipeline. There is no point in putting your orders in in 2028 because you then won't get it until 2032. So you have to put it into the system now. Up to now they weren't permitted to do that. It's risk aversion. But what I can say with a level of confidence is that there has been a significant change since the publication of the Task Force action plan, and I'll give you a number of examples of that. Earlier this month, Ishka Erin launched a procurement process, tendering process for procurement for Dublin drainage. That wouldn't have happened this time last year. Secondly, you will have read the LDA coming out and making a commitment that they're going to start building the apartments in the central mental hospital site, even though there's a threat of a judicial review. This time last year they wouldn't have made that decision because the risk averse was there. So a huge element of what we have done, and not only is it written in the Task Force action plan, we talked about it and talked about it and talked about it and change the mindset of people around risk aversion.

Greg Dilger: Do you think it's working?

Sean O'Driscoll: It's early days, but I've just given you, uh, two examples. I'm certainly hearing it from people within state agencies and people within the public system itself that there is a mindset change and there needs to be a mindset change. And again, we have a brave government, we have a brave minister, and they again have called out, uh, risk aversion and ultimately the responsibility will end up back with them as politicians if this backfired. But we have to hold our nerve because it's the right thing to do.

Greg Dilger: Sean, is there a. Within the public service? Is the thinking joined up enough in terms of public service, local authorities? Are we working together, working as well as we could? I presume not. Is that going to change?

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, the simple answer is we're not working in a coordinated way. Pretty unequivocal in that.

Greg Dilger: What's the big. What's the big issue out there?

Sean O'Driscoll: Everything is idols. You know, people don't, ah, don't speak to one another. And I suppose a very simple, classic example of that would be the lda, which was set up five years ago. It's taken them five years to establish what lands the state own. Five years because they didn't get cooperation from a lot of state agencies that is completely unacceptable. And again that is addressed in our action plan. And there's a duty of cooperation very clearly written out there. There's a duty of cooperation and there's an expectation.

Greg Dilger: It's amazing that you'd have to put that in place. You would expect.

Sean O'Driscoll: I know but you know, people say to me, how did this happen? You know, my answer to that is leave that to the historians. You know, we're focused on, we know what the issues are. How are we going to fix these issues. You know, you talked earlier about again about risk aversion. Every state agency has a risk register and part of what every one of them do is to try and eliminate risk. You can never eliminate risk. If you are to run something properly, you manage risk.

Greg Dilger: Fear of failure, I presume driving that. They don't want to fail.

Sean O'Driscoll: They don't want to fail. Each state agency and every semi state company again as part of the action plan has been asked and it will be expected that they revisit their risk and appetite in their risk register to open it up. If I take an example of a local authority plan, you're a particular local authority, you develop your local authority plan which you're required to do under legislation but then there is very little input from ESB Ishgarn. So you can decide in your plan this is where we're going to put the housing in our plan. But if there's no infrastructure, if there's no transport, if there's no water, if there's no electricity, finances. Yeah. And again that is a very significant action within the action plan. I said it's a brave government. The action plan is structured. I said to you at the outset that I had three asks and one was that this would be an action plan that to be timelined. There are 30 actions in the plan broken down into sub actions and there's a total of 138 sub actions. And against each of those the issue is explained. The action that's going to be taken is explained. There are KPIs against each of those actions as to what you can expect when, not if, when the action is implemented and people I'm assuming and then there is a quarter end timeline against it, against the action. And it says it names the lead department but if you actually go to the section on oversight and implementation it says the ultimate responsibility for the lead department is held by the Minister and the Secretary General. So they're named, we know who they are, you know, they won't be hiding in the shadow and that's What I mean by it's a brave government and uh, it is structured in such a way there is no hiding place. We as a task force will remain in place for the next 18 months. We meet once a month to oversee all of the actions and we had our first meeting at the end of January. We're having our first second meeting the first week of March. Everything is on target and of the 138sub actions nearly 70% of those have to be completed by quarter into two 2026 that's four months from now. Everything that was to be delivered in the back end of 2025 and the first part of 2026. Absolutely confident they've been done and I know that in the last three weeks. Three weeks ago a document came to cabinet on the heads of bill for emergency legislation on large infrastructure projects. Last week a paper came on the reform of judicial reviews and as we sit here I suspect there's a cabinet meeting on and I know one of the papers that's there is a simplification of permitting and licensing. The example I gave you earlier of Ishg ern having to deal with 21 permitting and licensing agencies on a sequential basis rather than a concurrent basis. And there is full transparency. There is full oversight for us as members of the task force but there's also full oversight for the opposition political parties to there is full oversight and transparency for the media. It's all there. There is no hiding place. And I would like to describe it as we've moved on from holding the fire. The feet are firmly in the fire.

Greg Dilger: I'm thinking just when you're talking there about the back to daa I know that's not going to get too specific and talk about individual things but I remember when DAA wanted to build Terminal 2 it was a complete uproar. It was over specced too expensive la la uh, the opposition were going everybody was getting exercised about it and within a relatively short period of time there's people saying it's too small and it's not big enough. And I guess that goes back to the risk aversion that's in the system and maybe not brave enough to go and make bold decisions but it goes to show that when we made a plan there it was drastically under spect so there's a lesson in that I guess to carry forward for the other things.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well at the time I suspect it wasn't under respect. Go m back to an earlier point I made. We never planned for this growth in our population nor was there an expectation to be perfectly honest with you, that our economy or our population would follow that trajectory. There is no doubt about it. We can build things. We can build things as well as anybody else. And it's not just the Terminal 2 in Dublin Airport, it's the port tunnel, it's the Lewes, it's the Dunkettle roundabout in Cork. We can do these things. And you know, the more of this we do and the more we can do it, the more ambitious we can become. One of the rationales given for the appointment of the chief executive of the Metrolink was his international expertise of mega infrastructure projects. And we didn't have that expertise in Ireland and we don't have that expertise in Ireland. So we need to attract that expertise into the country. The government's national development Plan out of 2035 is a capital plan of 275 billion. Now, uh, you read all the commentary about how flush we are with M funds, but we don't have 275 billion and we have to attract foreign capital into the country equally. We don't have the technical capacity or the people capacity today to do all of these projects. So again, we have to attract foreign contractors who specialize in large infrastructure projects into Ireland. And the only way you'll do that is by giving them confidence. Because quite frankly, up to very, very recently when it came to infrastructure, Ireland was seen as the wild west by international financial investors and infrastructure companies. When it came to infrastructure, because of our stop start, you know, first sign of economic downturn, um, we stopped the project. Uh, and secondly, because of how dysfunctional our planning and our legal system had become around the area of planning. So we need to be ambitious. Sorry.

Greg Dilger: M. Sean, is there our political system and our five year term, does that play against these long term plans where governments, their tendency, as you say, is to pull back when things get tough. So if they did something very drastic, they could be out of government as a result and then something else, a new policy comes in the next time.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, an example of a country that has a five year cycle with Denmark, M. And they manage to do it like they plan 15, 20 years out.

Greg Dilger: Do they have a better public engagement around that whole thing?

Sean O'Driscoll: They do. And again, public engagement, if you look at the last three stroke, four actions, it's around in the action plan. M. It's around public engagement. We have to explain to people what infrastructure actually means and why it's critical. And if we don't do it, you won't have water coming out of your tap. If you think you're gridlocked today. Wait until you see what happens in five years from now or ten years from now. And ultimately you will never, ever, ever fix our housing crisis unless you fix our infrastructure problem. You can build houses, but you won't be able to connect them to water or electricity or transport infrastructure. So it has to be done. And political engagement and the politicians have a big role to play here because something happens in their constituency, they might lose a couple of hundred votes. So they're against it. Um, so politicians have to man up, have to come out and also speak straight. But equally, those of us in civil society, whether it's business leaders or in other areas of society, we also have to speak up and just say, enough is enough. This cannot continue.

Greg Dilger: Sean, does the Omega kind of issue, like the, um, Children's Hospital does, that must damage public perception and confidence massively. When we're talking about this kind of thing that goes on and on. It's in the news constantly. By any measure, I think it's a disaster as a sort of. I'm sure the end product will be great, but the cost of it and the delays in it. So people are very cynical. And the opposition jump on it constantly. Even they jump on bike shelters and things like that. So the confidence of the general public in the system is certainly not high.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, I think you have to isolate the Children's Hospital. I said earlier, we are good at building things. I referenced the Terminal 2 in Dublin, referenced the Dunkettle roundabout in Cork, the Lewis system, the extension of the Lewis system. We just don't do enough of it. But all of these have been done, and they've been done quite by and large, within budget. Any overruns has been as a result of delays because of planning or judicial reviews, et cetera. The inflation issue I referred to earlier, I think you have to park the National Children's Hospital. It was designed on the run. There were drawings being done and there were things being taken out and other things being put in. It hasn't been case study, anything that we can be proud of when it comes to a large piece of infrastructure, which you learn from those lessons, rather than being paralyzed by it. And so what I'd say to you is that difficult challenges like that should never block us or should never deter us. We should learn from them. And one of the greatest messages in business, in my life that I learned, is study failure more than you study success, because there's far more failure than the success. So you study what happened in the Children's Hospital and just make sure. That it never happens again, but don't allow it to paralyze you.

Greg Dilger: Um, well, I think a bit of that has happened. I guess it's up to the political system to rebuild that and get it out there and talk as you're talking now. Planning. That's a big part of the whole thing. Everybody's familiar with the. You apply for planning permission and you go to onboard planola. And obviously in recent years we've seen a lot of the. Then it goes to court and judicial reviews have been the thing. And I read somewhere recently, I think it was Peter Kelly, the judge had a report and he, um. Oh yeah, he said a quote, actually, I have it here. Discovery in judicial reviews was routinely abused and weaponized. Very strong words. So the judicial review thing is a big issue to solve. I think a lot of things would flow better if that got sorted to a sort of certain standard. Obviously there will be and should be judicial reviews now and then, but it's got out of hand, I think.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, Justice Kelly is absolutely right. I think that report was done back in 2021 or 2022. There was a whole series of recommendations. I think was Chapter eight in his report, very few of which have been implemented. Hopefully they now will be implemented. But the starting point is judicial reviews are a fundamental part of our legal system. They're there for a very good reason and they're there as, ah, a legal instrument of last resort. Other avenues are closed. You use it as an instrument of last resort. And initially when it came to planning, judicial reviews were around, um, the actual planning decision itself, but it's morphed into something completely different. It's morphed into the process. And if you have a paper that's not properly completed that is subject to a judicial review, there's a typo. Effectively, it's a typo or an omission, but tiny things. And there have been situations where planning decisions have been quashed on the back of that m. But it's like a blood sport for some people. And I have no problem in saying this because when somebody goes on the public record and says something, you're entitled to express an opinion on it. There's a very interesting interview that was given to the currency magazine in August 2024 by somebody who is well known, um, in the area of taking judicial reviews and planning objections, et cetera. And the article actually says that this person in the previous decade had 90 cases before the High Court. But this person also went on to say this interview was in the middle of August 2024. This person went on to say that in the period up to mid August 2024, he had submitted 300 objections to local authorities, 30 to Ambor Planola and four judicial reviews. Now that may be legal, it may be lawful, but the question you have to ask is, is it right? M Something can be legal, maybe not. It's not right. And you go back to what I was talking about earlier, the societal impact or impact that citizens have with the state and the housing crisis that we have. I don't see the funny side of that. This simply isn't right. And when it comes to judicial reviews in the action plan, it's that scale of industrial objection that we are saying needs to stop.

Greg Dilger: Presumably, Sean, even just the threat of it has already put people off doing things in Ireland. They say there's no point, it'll take forever.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, I mentioned to you earlier, Greg, that the lda, you were talking about risk aversion. And I said the LDA recently said that they're going ahead with building despite the threat of a judicial review. And I also said that would not have happened this time last year. We have to lance the boil here. M these are significant issues that are, they are huge societal issues. And then there is the enormous cost to the taxpayer of the country. And there is a case, initially when we started looking at this, we were hearing things like, well, we can't because of the Aorus Convention, we can't because of the Heather Hill judgment. So if you take the Aorus Convention, that's the United Nations Convention that was transposed into European directive and then transposed into Irish law. And what it says, the key thing that it says is that access to the judicial system should not be prohibitive for environmental cases. It doesn't say it should be free legal aid or it doesn't say it should be a risk free shot at the dartboard, which is what it has become. And the Heather Hill judgment has been sitting there for the last number of years and hasn't been. The consequences of it haven't been addressed. And yet if a very, very smart tax lawyer in Dublin came up with a tax scheme to help clients avoid tax and the revenue became aware of it, they'd have a hotline to the Department of Finance and say, you need to change this word or this line in the Finance act to close this down, that's where this is heading. But it's been sitting there for the last number of years and nobody doing anything about it. But it's even worse than that, Greg. In that the way European directives are transposed into Irish law. So let's take the Environmental Impact Directive. The European director says if a country is constructing wastewater treatment plant that services, uh, more than 150,000 people, it's mandatory to do an environmental impact assessment in Ireland. In transposing it, we have written 10,000 into our legislation. So 150,000 is the European requirement. We've written 10,000.

Greg Dilger: Why would we not just take 150?

Sean O'Driscoll: They're the questions that have been asked and they're the issues that will now be addressed. In addition to that, an existing ESB substation, Anishker and water plant, fresh wastewater plant. They can increase capacity by up to 10% without going through the planning system. If you ask three questions. Why 10%? Who came up with it? When did they come up with it? You won't get an answer. If you took it up to 50%, it's a complete game changer for them. And then you have directives in European law that comes out by way of a statutory instrument. It may well have an impact on your department. The first you'll know about it is when there's a case down in the four courts. And that goes back to the lack of coordination, joined up thinking. And that's the situation we have got ourselves into. But we can get out of it.

Greg Dilger: How quickly could we move on that and rebalance the thing so that it makes.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, all of this is in the task force action plan. Everything has to be done by the first quarter of 2027. Everything but the legal process.

Greg Dilger: As we know, there will be challenges to this. Probably.

Sean O'Driscoll: The government has made it very clear they're expecting legal challenge and that they're going to take on these legal challenges. Is the country run by lawyers? Is it run by the legal profession? Or is it run by a democratically elected government and a democratically elected Dal. Aaron and Shannon Aaron and we need to get this balance right.

Greg Dilger: If that was solved to a satisfactory level, how good would that feel in terms of this sort of activity going on? Would that change things very dramatically, do you think?

Sean O'Driscoll: Every One of the 138 are pieces of the jigsaw. It's not an a la carte. Every single one of these need to be done, and the expectation is they will be done. And that's what our job as a task force going forward now is to oversee the implementation. We'll meet once a month. We'll be sending, um, a report to Cabinet, the infrastructure committee of Cabinet, on a quarterly basis. And we will Be, you know, doing various events during the course of the year, talking about progress. And I am very confident that this is going to get done. It has to get done. We have no alternative, Sean.

Greg Dilger: Just another sort of one out of the blue a little bit. The data centers gets a lot of, um, airplay from people. I even heard some civil servant mention some time ago that data centers are housing. You can't have both, that type of thing. How do you react to that?

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, I think we have to. Again, it goes back to planning our economy, um, and we have to plan for it. Artificial intelligence is not something in the future. It's all around us. And a huge part of our economic success has been built on foreign direct investment. And we can't pick and choose. We can't say we want X, we want your corporation tax, but we're not going to allow you to build data centers.

Greg Dilger: We did it with Apple a few years ago in Athenrai, if you remember.

Sean O'Driscoll: Yeah, I don't know.

Greg Dilger: There might have been good reasons.

Sean O'Driscoll: And again, judicial M review played a huge part in that. Uh, judicial review played a huge part in Apple and AT and Rye and their decision to say, uh, we're going to move on from here. I know during the process, many US multinationals have told me we are actually losing billions of investment. Not that they're shutting up shop and leaving Ireland, but the investments that would historically have come Ireland's way are not coming here. Are not coming here. And an area where, if this was private enterprise and you could get your hands on us and solve us. Board Nimona, or, uh, B and M as it's now called. They have about 200,000 acres of land from Mayo all the way across to Dublin, coming through the spine of the country. And I would have thought an ideal. It's about 1.8% of the land mass of the country that they own. Why wouldn't you have energy parks in there? Renewable energy parks generating the energy that's required for the data centers.

Greg Dilger: There's no planning problems. There are less planning problems. Presumably there's given the ownership of it.

Sean O'Driscoll: Yeah, I would have thought so. And certainly, you know, there appears to be an acceptance because they do have wind farms on them. We just need to be imaginative and go back to something I said again earlier. Okay. Difficulties are there as a challenge to learn from, but they should never stop us or they should never prevent us from doing the right thing.

Greg Dilger: Quick word, Sean, on public procurement. Might, uh, have mentioned it briefly. I have a sense I might be totally wrong. No data on it that we as part. I know there's all sorts of scores and they assess various contractors and providers and they do very deep scoring system and they award the contract. Do we focus on the lowest price too much maybe or is there any evidence of that?

Sean O'Driscoll: I've seen situations where we haven't focused on lowest price enough.

Greg Dilger: Okay. Might end up being the highest price though.

Sean O'Driscoll: It might end up being the highest price. Yeah. I would have huge reservations around public procurement and I've had first hand experience of it in other areas of my life. Not as a supplier into it but seeing what happens. And if you speak to some of the people who are actually intimately involved within the civil service, sometimes they throw their hands up if a particular company is mentioned or if a particular service that's being procured is mentioned and they just have to do it because they're the European rules.

Greg Dilger: So if a contractor turns up from the scoring is the winner and they've done a bad job for you before somewhere else maybe a couple of.

Sean O'Driscoll: You can't do anything about it.

Greg Dilger: There seems to be a se.

Sean O'Driscoll: You can't do anything.

Greg Dilger: There's a sequence of getting in our own way here all across the piste.

Sean O'Driscoll: You can't do anything about it. Like sometimes Greg, the law's a mess.

Greg Dilger: Just a thought as I go along in here. Given that you guys, you've done your report and you're going to stay with it for another few months. Is there any case or I may. Is it more quango really to. It wouldn't be a quango. You know the NTMA came into being supplement what we were doing with a lot of expertise uh, that we didn't have and there was an acknowledgement of that. Is there a case for something like that here after the task force that you have perhaps a small group of elite project manager sorts who would see this thing through given the amount of money at play. It's such a big amount of money that you could manage with very good quality resource.

Sean O'Driscoll: Look, I can only comment on what we were asked to do.

Greg Dilger: Yeah, but will it need that to keep it going, keep the pressure on because you guys are going to be easing off over the next one.

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, on infrastructure, no, I think we will have built up good momentum because again what's different now is when we came in I mentioned at the outset uh, some of the harsh comments that I made about the Department of Public Expenditure when I was asked day one on this. I've changed my mind. It is the right department to have it in.

Greg Dilger: Okay.

Sean O'Driscoll: It's no longer just a unit within the department. It's now a permanent division within the department. It is its own deputy Secretary General. It's been properly staffed, including with legal resources. But the second arrangement that we put in place where the main utilities, uh, seconded a senior official into work within the unit, that would become a permanent feature going forward. Now it won't be Greg permanently, but it will be somebody who aspires to get in there for 24 months and sees it as a career progression to get in there. So that will continue. And the other thing that I ah, think it has very much highlighted and crystallized the department, the world reform is included in the title of that department for a long time. This is probably the most significant reform project that it has ever undertaken or been involved with. And it can and it must learn that this is the way to do it.

Greg Dilger: Well, it's great. Like we're talking to this podcast is, you know, listened to by business people of all shapes and sizes around Ireland. And I know they'll have heard of this task force already and they'll have read something, but I think the hearing it from, uh, straight from the horse's mouth as it were, will be really, really helpful. Last question for you. And I actually wrote this down just to sort of, I think it covers it as best I can. What would you want to have happened or changed for you to look back in two years time to make you say that accelerated uh, task force really was worth it?

Sean O'Driscoll: Well, firstly, somebody is asking me a question, kind of a first cousin of your question. What will success mean? Success means to me 100% implementation of the actions. It's not a la carte 100%. I genuinely believe, even though some of the legislative issues have uh, strayed into the first quarter of 2027 for timelines, I think it can all be done by 2026. And uh, if I look out to two years from now, it is that I could honestly say to you we can fix our housing problem because we've fixed our infrastructure problem. And the early signs have been very positive. It was very noticeable that uh, the opposition parties didn't come out and saying it wasn't radical enough or didn't come out and saying they missed X or Ms. Y. Maybe we did Ms. X or Y, but we have a mechanism if we did miss them that we can pick them up during the course of the year. The public consultation that we undertook was a very extensive one and the, the barriers and the issues that came in on those submissions were remarkably similar. And that's why we can say this is an evidence based set of barriers and here's how you fix them. And every single one of them has a KPI beside it. So, Craig, you'll be able to look at them two years from now and say, uh, has this done what they said it would do? So, very hopeful, Sean.

Greg Dilger: Really appreciate that. It was a great chat. And really, um, I learned a lot myself. I think it's obvious and easy to see now why you had such a marvelous career in Glen Dimplex. There's such clarity and discipline there. But thank you very much, Emilia Renatus. Really enjoy that.

Sean O'Driscoll: You're very welcome.