Siac chief tells Barry O'Halloran of the many problems facing State civil engineering projects

The next time you're stuck in a traffic jam, don't blame the physical infrastructure - it's the political and legal infrastructure that's at fault.

Finn Lyden, managing director of Siac Construction, one of the country's biggest civil engineering groups, says that firms such as his are bringing big projects in on time, once they get the go-ahead from the relevant State agency.

The problem, he argues, lies in getting big projects from the initial planning to the stage where someone can actually start building them. And even after that, our planning system still leaves them vulnerable to delays caused by everything from snails to archeological excavations.

"The biggest problem is, I suppose, the legal-political infrastructure itself," he says. "When the projects get to the construction stage, timescale is fairly manageable."

He acknowledges that there are some exceptions to this, the Dublin Port Tunnel for instance. But he stresses that the real hold ups begin at the very early stage in any project's life.

"The real time delay is from project conception to getting it to where the contractors are actually starting. That's where the time delays are, and that's where there's huge variation, and that's where there needs to be major changes to make the system deliver these things more efficiently," he says.

The M50, the motorway that circles Dublin to the west, has been 25 years on the drawing boards, he points out. "The difficulty we have is that we seem to have a whole range of legislation, and there doesn't seem to be any proportionality in terms of the importance of the legislation, so a project like the M50 can be ambushed by Carrickmines [where the road cut through the remains of an old castle], notwithstanding the fact that there is a ministerial order to go ahead and complete this project."

The problem in situations such as this, he believes, is that when archeological or other issues arise, they are accorded the same importance as the overall need to get the project finished.

At the same time, he says our system is too inflexible to allow the planners and engineers to come up with solutions to difficulties such as those encountered at Carrickmines.

The planning process makes no allowance for altering road routes to avoid important heritage or environmental features, so it means that once a problem is encountered, the whole project is unwound.

What we need, he says, is a system under which the projects are brought through the planning process, ending with a ministerial order giving them the go ahead. "Nothing should be able to interfere with that, there should be a three-month judicial review period, and that's it," he says.

"It shouldn't be possible to be ambushed by some piece of legislation from 1931 or whenever, in that case the archeological issues, because that disrupts the whole process. Or, like we had in the past, landowners objecting to the route. All those things interfere with the process."

Lyden claims that the Irish planning system, particularly the way it applies environmental impact studies (EIS), means even minute issues can interfere with major projects, even where it is in the national interest that something is built on time and in budget.

"Once the Minister signs the order, the train should have departed. But what happens here is that people can object using all sorts of legislation for quite a long time afterward. That's what adds hugely to the time and cost of those projects."

So if the Government is serious about proposals such as the €34 billion transport plan that it announced last week, he believes that it is going to have to introduce legislation that will cut out delays and make sure that when it comes to building new rail lines and roads, that priority at all times is given to completing them. That will require political will and leadership, he says.

What Lyden is talking about sounds very much like the Critical Infrastructure Bill, that the Government - displaying its usual levels of political will and leadership - ditched after a lot of wrangling.

As a compromise, An Bord Pleanála will have a special division to deal with plans for road, rail and other infrastructure projects. Its remit won't extend to incinerators, which were a flashpoint when the Government came up with the Critical Infrastructure Bill.

Lyden makes no reference to the political horse trading. However, he does not think that the disappearance of the infrastructure Bill bodes well for Government efforts to get the transport plan off the ground. Nor is he confident that our leaders have the political will to make the hard decisions necessary to ensure its success.

As an example he takes the "central station", proposed for Dublin's Stephen's Green. This will be the hub for what will be the city's various internal rail services. Lyden points out that it can only be built beneath the Green, and that the cheapest way to do that will be to dig up a landmark in the centre of the capital.

"Is the political will there to say right, we're going to face three or five years of chaos while we dig up Stephen's Green, take away a lot of the trees, because the end result is in everybody's interest?" he asks. "That means that somebody is going to have to decide that we are going to have to dig up Stephen's Green and plan on that basis."

Even if this were to happen, he points out that it could be derailed half way through if it emerged that some of the trees or other plants were protected in some way.

"If that type of thinking is allowed to interfere with building the thing efficiently, you'll have huge cost over runs and it might never happen," he says.

Along with this, there is the Department of Finance plan to introduce fixed-price contracts for infrastructure projects. He says that this will mean that the contractors will have to bear the risk where projects are delayed by things beyond their control, because they are the responsibility of Government or a State agency.

The huge variety of State agencies with responsibility for infrastructure is itself a problem. According to Lyden, there are more than 50. This leads to a lack of what he calls "joined up thinking" when it comes to planning. For example, the Dublin Port Tunnel is supposed to alleviate traffic in the city.

But its planning and construction missed an opportunity for removing trucks from the roads. Large numbers of trucks bring aviation fuel to Dublin Airport.

They could have been eliminated completely if, along with the tunnel, the State had put in a pipeline to transport the fuel to the airport. The final issue is money, not the lack of it, but the fact that we're not spending enough. The transport plan will require the Government to spend €9.4 million a day between next year and 2015 to complete. But Lyden says that the State is falling short of its infrastructure spending targets.

"We had a commitment from Charlie McCreevy, when he was minister for finance, to spend 5 per cent of GNP (gross national product) on public capital programmes and we can't spend that," he says.

"The actual amount of money that's being spent is 4.2 per cent, or something like that, this year. So the figures are approximately €800 or €900 million shy."

Ever since McCreevy made that promise, the State has fallen short of it. Not only that, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) estimates that we need to spend 5.5 per cent of GNP, about €1 billion more than we are spending, on infrastructure.

That money is meant to provide for the State's future economic development. If we don't spend it, we may not have the capacity to maintain economic growth. However, Lyden believes that the department view is that we're "saving" the money rather than constraining future expansion.

If we're underspending now, we're going to find it very hard to reach the levels that we need to in order to deliver the transport plan.

But he points out that the underspending problem itself relates back to difficulties in getting projects to the point where the contractors can come in and start building.

And these are, of course, the difficulties which are keeping many Irish people stuck in traffic jams every day.