As a nation we are not known for delivering infrastructure or major capital projects with any great haste, it has to be said.

West Cork is a prime example, with several bypass projects in the pipeline and no sign of getting any of them over the line any time soon.

Just last week council officials admitted that even if funding is secured at every stage of the process through the planning, design and construction stages of the Innishannon bypass, it will be at least another decade before it is built.

This is a bypass first mooted over 50 years ago, which was then shelved, much to the frustration of local residents who anecdotally report upwards of 1,000 heavy goods vehicles trundling through the village on a daily basis.

But that’s just one of countless projects which have seemingly been long-fingered by the powers that be. The Clonakilty bypass is arguably an inner relief road at best and does not go anywhere near far enough in addressing traffic gridlock at peak times.

As for the Bandon bypass, the hill is so steep as to warrant a safety hazard and the T-junction right turn should have a set of traffic lights on it. This project is also in the pipeline for an upgrade, with no definitive timeframe.

Cast the net wider and the national picture is even more bleak – some might say farcical even. The MetroLink project connecting Dublin Airport to the city centre has been stalled countless times over more than 20 years and has quadrupled in price. Where else would you get a capital city with no direct rail transport link to the city centre?

However it pales into insignificance when you consider the shambles that is the so-called delivery of the National Children’s Hospital. If ever there was a blueprint on how not to manage a project, surely this is it. A McKinsey report commissioned by the HSE as far back as 2006 recommended building a single national children’s hospital. In 2009, then Taoiseach Brian Cowen said it would be open in 2014.

What ensued was a protracted back and forth dispute over the preferred location, and a contentious decision to change the location from Blanchardstown to the campus of St James’s Hospital in the heart of the city.

Planning was granted in 2016, a full ten years ago, and two decades after it was first decided that the project was needed, yet it has still to open its doors. What we have on record is 19 missed completion dates, four health ministers, and a continuing saga which has caused a national outcry.

The National Children’s Hospital project is one of the country’s most significant infrastructural undertakings, but it will go down in history as one of its most significant failures.

Costs for the state-of-the-art facility have spiralled to €2.2bn (and counting). Fragmented decision-making resulted in accountability gaps, with no unified command structure in place.

If nothing else, this should serve as a sobering lesson for the future.

Bureaucracy gone mad

Earlier this week it emerged that 5,462 people aged 70 and over lost their full medical card in the past five years.

This in itself is sobering, but what is even more startling is the fact that they did not lose the supports because of their means, but because of red tape.

Independent Ireland TD for Cork North Central Ken O’Flynn released the figures which had been provided to him by the HSE in response to a parliamentary question.

The statistics show that these medical cards were automatically downgraded to a GP visit card – simply because these 5,462 pensioners did not respond to a HSE review. Over the same period from 2021, just 11 people were refused full medical cards on income grounds.

The numbers peaked in 2024, when 1,577 people lost their full card for not responding, almost double any other year. This surely can only be described as bureaucracy gone mad? As Deputy O’Flynn pointed out, many of these are vulnerable, elderly people living alone, people with poor eyesight or memory problems, people whose post may well go astray.

To penalise them for failing to respond to a letter seems at best cavalier and at worst callous and cruel. Further questions are being asked of the HSE, as well they should. Depriving those who need support the most of that very support because they failed to reply to a review is simply not good enough.