Collison's Bombshell: The Political Betrayal Killing Ireland's Future

Since 1990, Ireland’s population has surged dramatically, growing from 3.5 million to approximately 5.5 million—a growth rate faster than almost any other country in the European Union. Yet, despite this massive demographic and economic boom, Ireland currently possesses the continent’s second-fewest homes per person. How can a nation defined by exceptional talent and immense private wealth be regressing on the most fundamental necessities required for a modern quality of life?

This profound discrepancy is not attributable to a lack of money, ambition, or expertise; it is the direct result of systemic political failure. This failure critically impacts every facet of daily life: your family structure, your economic opportunity, your commute, and your future. The governing class has fundamentally forgotten the basics of national planning and execution, and the consequences are now devastatingly visible across the Republic.

The Invisible Crisis Killing Your Quality of Life

The infrastructure crisis is not a theoretical or distant problem; it is an active, ongoing catastrophe eroding Ireland’s competitiveness. The situation is dire in key urban centres: Dublin’s water network, for instance, is projected to hit absolute supply limits in just three years, a critical bottleneck that will effectively halt housing construction dead in its tracks regardless of planning permissions. Simultaneously, Irish households face electricity prices that are among the highest in Europe, further taxing the consumer and driving inflation.

The human cost of this stagnation is immeasurable. Generational disconnect is becoming enforced, as adult children are compelled to live hours away from aging parents and grandparents due to housing costs and scarcity. Students are increasingly barred from vital university life, forced into arduous commutes or impossible rents, damaging educational outcomes and social cohesion. For the professional workforce, the average daily commute now stretches towards three hours for many, a massive drain on productivity, mental health, and leisure time. This unrelenting stress frays the social fabric of the country, driving deep-seated anger, increasing political polarization, and threatening the stability of the state’s political consensus.

The objective facts laid out by technology leader John Collison are stark and infuriating: Ireland possesses 41 percent less essential infrastructure—including trains, roads, and general transport networks—per capita than other comparable high-income European countries. Furthermore, it maintains the lowest proportion of electrified rail in the entire EU. This deficit is the inescapable price of decades of political inertia and the collective failure to prioritize, fund, and, critically, build.

The Bureaucratic Logjam Revealed

The core mechanism of this failure, according to Collison’s incisive analysis, is a political system that has systematically and deliberately ceded its control, generating a stifling, decentralized “government-by-agency” logjam. In a bombshell finding that exposes the scale of political delegation, Collison notes that since the year 2000, the State has created a staggering 303 new government agencies, quangos, or departments. This figure stands in profound contrast to the mere 74 agencies created in the preceding 25 years.

This exponential proliferation of autonomous agencies has functionally reassigned executive power from elected politicians—who are directly and democratically accountable to the Irish citizenry—to an unelected, often permanent Civil Service and associated statutory bodies. Collison argues forcefully that this process of “constrained power” is being disingenuously conflated with “good governance.” This delegation allows elected officials to avoid difficult, necessary trade-offs inherent in national planning (such as balancing environmental concerns with housing supply), resulting in chronic problems remaining unfixed and unaddressed. Our politicians, Collison suggests, are operating on systemic autopilot, and the public is bearing the exponentially increasing cost of this avoidance.

This complex structure ensures a paralyzing lack of coordination. Projects that are deemed essential for the national good must navigate dozens of overlapping, often contradictory, regulatory requirements and approval processes. The result is project lead times measured not in years, but in decades, ensuring that infrastructure perpetually lags behind demographic reality.

Naming the Agencies That Block Progress

The functional result of this decentralized bureaucratic complexity is a system where a single-issue agency, focused on a narrow statutory remit, can unilaterally veto or indefinitely delay a massive, nationally strategic infrastructure project. This combinatorial complexity creates an impenetrable web of bureaucracy designed to defend specific interests rather than serve the common good.

Collison provides sharp, concrete examples of agencies actively obstructing crucial national progress:

An Taisce (The National Trust for Ireland): This organization has been central to blocking pivotal projects including the Galway ring road (necessary to unlock the economic growth of the West), the M3 motorway (a critical route that faced years of delay), and the vital Shannon LNG scheme (a project crucial for securing energy independence and diversity).
Fingal County Council Officials: These local planners have been accused of throttling capacity expansions at Dublin Airport—Ireland’s primary international gateway—limiting essential flight slots and expansion, thereby curbing national connectivity and tourism growth.
Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI): This body has historically blocked essential flood remediation works in numerous vulnerable areas, prioritizing specific aquatic habitats over the protection of homes and entire communities.
The Heritage Council: Even seemingly minor bodies contribute to the paralysis, such as the Heritage Council blocking the demolition of a seemingly inconsequential wall necessary for the construction of the N2 bypass, highlighting the absurd specificity and rigidity of the planning environment.

These bodies, in their legitimate but overly aggressive pursuit of narrow, single-issue goals, collectively construct a paralyzing logjam that prevents the overriding common good from being served. Citizens feel the crushing injustice of this paralysis every single day through higher costs, longer commutes, and unattainable housing. The cumulative effect of these vetoes is a nation incapable of investing in its own future.

How to Seize Back Control and Build

Collison’s prescriptive solution is not merely a complaint; it is an exclusive, clear, and actionable path designed to get Ireland moving again. This requires a radical political commitment to reverse the chronic power drain and for leaders to re-embrace their central role as decision-makers who must make difficult, necessary trade-offs on behalf of the populace.

To immediately break the existing planning deadlock, Collison proposes several key legislative and judicial reforms:

1. Specialised Planning Courts

Collison calls for the establishment of a specialized fast-track division of the High Court dedicated solely to processing planning judicial reviews (JRs). Ireland’s existing planning system is crippled by the high volume and indefinite duration of JRs—legal challenges often initiated by single, organized opponents intended solely to delay projects until they become economically unviable. This specialized court would centralize expertise, enforce strict timelines for review, and decisively stop endless, costly delays that currently deter large-scale investment. Crucially, the focus must shift from facilitating endless litigation to confirming procedural fairness swiftly, thereby providing certainty for developers and the state.

2. Modernizing Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs)

He further advocates for updated primary legislation governing Compulsory Purchase Orders. Currently, CPO processes are labyrinthine and often subject to protracted, costly compensation battles that allow land owners to hold the state ransom, delaying vital projects for years. New legislation must streamline the acquisition process, provide equitable but decisive compensation frameworks, and eliminate the potential for strategic, time-wasting litigation by vested interests resisting state acquisition for public infrastructure.

3. Implementing a Higher Land-Value Tax (LVT)

Perhaps the most crucial economic lever proposed is the imposition of a substantially higher land-value tax (LVT) on zoned development land that remains undeveloped. This policy is specifically designed to tackle strategic land hoarding—a major inhibitor of housing supply. Under current rules, speculating on zoned land is often more profitable than building on it. An LVT, increasing the holding cost of vacant but serviced land, would force hoarders to “use it or lose it.” This mechanism would effectively unlock desperately needed construction sites, inject supply into the market, and break the speculative cycle driving housing costs skyward.

This proposed shift represents more than just policy adjustments; it is a political fight for the economic and social soul of the nation. It is a demand to stop managing systemic decline and to start aggressively building a future that is commensurate with Ireland’s enormous private sector economic success. The fundamental choice remains: Do we continue to accept a political system that prioritizes opaque bureaucratic process and unaccountable agency power over the urgent needs of 5.5 million people, or do we finally re-empower our elected leaders to build the modern, functioning Ireland we collectively deserve?

Background and Context

The analysis delivered by John Collison, co-founder of the global technology giant Stripe, is fundamentally an indictment of Ireland’s structural capacity and its governing class’s chronic failure to translate immense private sector wealth into functional, world-class public infrastructure. To understand the gravity of Collison’s “bombshell” intervention, it is essential to contextualize the extraordinary economic, demographic, and political forces that have fundamentally reshaped the Republic of Ireland since the late 20th century.

The Double-Edged Sword of Prosperity

Ireland’s modern success story is defined by two profound, intersecting shifts. The first was the ‘Celtic Tiger’ era, beginning in the mid-1990s, a period that transformed the nation from a historically poor, indebted, and emigration-plagued state into a global powerhouse for technology, pharmaceuticals, and finance. This phenomenal success was engineered primarily through the strategic attraction of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), facilitated by exceptionally competitive corporate tax rates and access to the European Single Market. This strategy created hundreds of thousands of high-value, export-oriented jobs. This economic success is not historical; it persists today, evidenced by Ireland’s status as the undisputed European headquarters for giants like Collison’s own Stripe, Google, Apple, Meta, and Pfizer. The flow of corporate tax receipts is staggering, resulting in Ireland reporting one of the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures per capita globally.

However, this spectacular economic growth—a growth fundamentally dependent on a highly educated and highly mobile international workforce—mandated constant, massive, and matching investment in foundational national infrastructure. Crucially, this requisite public investment largely failed to materialize, particularly after the 2008 financial crash and during the ensuing recovery period. Successive governments, while reaping the benefits of massive tax revenues and the increasing population, systemically neglected the core mandate of long-term national planning and execution. The wealth generated has been sequestered, failing to flow into the essential physical and social infrastructure necessary to sustain the population it attracts. This created a structural deficit between economic capacity and societal functionality.

The Demographic Shockwave

The second critical factor is the unprecedented demographic acceleration that forms the crux of Collison’s statistical evidence and critique. In 1990, the population of the Republic of Ireland stood at approximately 3.5 million. By the latest census estimates and projections, that figure has soared to approximately 5.5 million people—an increase of nearly 57% in just over three decades. This is not the organic, slow growth seen in most OECD nations; it is a seismic demographic event unparalleled in speed and scale in modern Western Europe.

This explosive growth is fuelled by several simultaneous and reinforcing factors: a significant return of the Irish diaspora reversing decades of emigration; consistently high birth rates relative to other EU nations; and, most crucially today, high net inward migration driven by the demands of the FDI economy. The economic engine requires a steady influx of skilled professionals—engineers, tech specialists, healthcare workers, and construction labour—necessitating the rapid, consistent addition of international residents.

The political system, however, has consistently failed to acknowledge or accept the permanence of this new, larger population base. Rather than adopting the robust, long-term planning mechanisms commensurate with a 5.5 million-person economy—and planning for the projected trajectory towards 6 million—policy has remained reactive, often treating infrastructural needs as temporary or cyclical issues that can be managed through short-term fixes or delegation. This pervasive lack of strategic foresight means the government is always attempting to retroactively build infrastructure for the population of five years ago, inevitably worsening the current deficit.

The Housing Paradox: Scarcity Amidst Super-Wealth

The most immediate, visible, and corrosive manifestation of this systemic failure is the housing crisis, which Collison highlights using the damning metric of homes per person. Ireland now stands as one of the most structurally undersupplied nations in the EU in terms of accommodation units relative to its existing population. Where comparable nations like Spain, France, or Germany boast sufficient housing stock built for historical population peaks, providing a crucial buffer against fluctuating demand, Ireland’s current housing count severely and dangerously lags behind current demand.

This acute shortage is far more than an inconvenience; it is functionally corrosive to national stability and economic competitiveness. It drives catastrophic rental and purchase price inflation, forces highly skilled young workers into perpetual financial dependency, severely hampers social mobility, and actively threatens Ireland’s capacity to attract and retain the foreign talent essential for the FDI sector to survive. The crisis has metastasised beyond simple housing, fundamentally impairing healthcare capacity (as nurses and doctors cannot afford to live near hospitals), overwhelming public transport systems (where delays in delivering projects like the Dublin Metro run into decades), and straining the provision of basic utilities and essential services, underscoring the systemic failure to build the “basics” that a sophisticated, modern economy demands.

Collison’s intervention, originating from a figure deeply embedded in the metrics of global business efficiency and execution, shifts the narrative away from traditional political blame games towards an engineering and governance critique: Ireland is a fantastically rich country that has engineered a catastrophic failure of supply and planning, effectively betraying the future opportunities promised by its own economic success through deliberate inaction and bureaucratic stagnation. This background of profound, rapid growth met by equally profound policy inertia sets the definitive stage for the accusation of political betrayal.

Key Developments: The Systemic Failure to Execute

John Collison’s groundbreaking analysis cuts sharply through the often-celebratory narrative surrounding Ireland’s headline GDP figures, focusing instead on the catastrophic failure of the state to translate this unparalleled economic success into demonstrable basic societal capacity. The key developments fueling this crisis are rooted in a uniquely Irish combination of explosive demographic growth, systemic planning failures, and a political apparatus paralyzed by short-term electoral considerations and institutional avoidance.

The Failure to Match Demand

The primary development driving the current crisis is the sheer magnitude and speed of Ireland’s population expansion. Since 1990, the population surged by 57%, moving from 3.5 million to 5.5 million today. This pace of expansion is unprecedented among almost all comparable high-income EU nations. This expansion was initially driven by the “Celtic Tiger” return of the diaspora and high birth rates, but post-2015, the growth has continued unabated, fuelled overwhelmingly by high net migration required by Ireland’s successful Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) strategy.

Collison highlights that this unprecedented demographic pressure was met not with accelerated investment or strategic foresight, but with chronic institutional lag. The planning and procurement systems of the state operate at a pace suited to a 1980s economy, completely incapable of responding to 21st-century demand. This mismatch means that every key piece of infrastructure—roads, hospitals, power grids, housing—was under-planned and under-built for decades, creating a cumulative deficit that has now reached critical mass. The consequence is simple: the political system effectively failed to deliver the physical space required for the economic miracle it championed.

The Politicisation of Delegation

A secondary, but profoundly insidious, key development is the mass delegation of authority to the 303 newly created agencies and quangos since 2000. This administrative shift, Collison argues, is a deliberate political manoeuvre. By delegating contentious decisions concerning planning, environmental concerns, and resource allocation to independent, non-elected bodies, politicians successfully insulated themselves from immediate electoral backlash.

This delegation, however, fractured state power. When hundreds of entities possess veto power over a single project, accountability evaporates. The elected politician can claim innocence (“It was blocked by the agency”), while the agency official operates within a narrow, non-accountable statutory silo. This creates a powerful negative feedback loop: the system rewards caution, discourages decisive trade-offs, and ensures projects requiring coordination between dozens of entities simply fail to launch. The political class has created an escape route for itself, leaving the national interest stranded in a bog of inter-agency paralysis.

The Judicial Bottleneck

A third critical development is the weaponization of the judicial review process in planning. While judicial review is an essential safeguard of fairness, its implementation in Ireland has become an effective tool for perpetual project delay. Collison notes that the complexity and duration of planning appeals and judicial challenges provide a guaranteed mechanism for opponents—whether they are single-issue environmental groups or commercial rivals—to stop projects indefinitely.

The state’s current legal framework is too slow, too fragmented, and lacks the necessary specialization to rapidly differentiate between legitimate challenges concerning due process and strategic litigation designed purely to impose crippling financial and time costs. This weakness has actively inhibited large-scale, private-sector investment in infrastructure, including critical residential developments, ensuring that risk-averse capital avoids Ireland in favour of nations with predictable regulatory and legal timelines. The failure here is legislative: the political system has not reformed its legal processes to match the scale of modern development needs, effectively allowing the courts to become a venue for infrastructural sabotage.

Fiscal Conservatism Amidst Fiscal Wealth

Finally, the period of infrastructure stagnation post-2008 was characterized by a pervasive political caution regarding public spending, even when Ireland’s tax revenues soared due to the resilient FDI sector. Despite having significant budgetary space and extraordinary national wealth (as measured by tax receipts and GDP), the political inclination was towards maintaining fiscal buffers, often prioritizing savings or tax cuts over aggressive, front-loaded investment in catching up the infrastructure deficit.

This short-term fiscal conservatism directly clashes with the long-term imperative of building for a 5.5 million-person economy. This choice meant that while private profits surged, public assets withered. The result is the current situation: a nation theoretically capable of buying anything but structurally incapable of building anything due to legal, bureaucratic, and political constraints. Collison’s proposed solutions—the fast-track courts and the land-value tax—are designed specifically to dismantle these self-imposed blockades and demand that the state prioritizes action over avoidance. The stakes are immense: without these radical changes, Ireland faces a crisis of capacity that will eventually choke off the very economic engine that sustains it.