The Irish infrastructure build map: what is funded, what is approved, and what is actually being built

The money is not the problem

Ireland has rewritten its national plan twice since 2018, upward both times. The current one commits EUR 275.4 billion over 2026 to 2035: EUR 202.4 billion Exchequer, EUR 63 billion non-Exchequer and EUR 10 billion of equity in State companies. The five-year department ceilings were set at EUR 102.4 billion, and the Mid-Year Expenditure Report of 30 July 2026 put total five-year Exchequer capital at EUR 106.5 billion, EUR 4.1 billion above the amounts so far allocated to departments. About EUR 17 billion was invested in 2025 and EUR 19 billion is projected for 2026, over 5 per cent of GNI*, the measure of the Irish economy with the multinational distortions stripped out.

One correction, because the wrong number is everywhere. EUR 112 billion appears nowhere in the plan. It is the EUR 102.4 billion of ceilings plus EUR 10 billion of equity, added together by somebody else. And one piece of history worth knowing: the 2021 plan flagged construction capacity as a key delivery risk in its own text. Five years on, that is the story.

The two documents most of the market still quotes are out of date. The plan that ran to 2030 was replaced on 22 July 2025, and Prospects 2024/2025, still the procurement calendar in most people's heads, has no successor edition: sectoral investment plans replaced it in late 2025. The live list is the Investment Projects and Programmes Tracker, over 500 projects and 146 programmes above EUR 20 million at the end of 2024, against over 340 a year earlier.

Where the money sits

The sectoral plans set the shape, and the largest single network programme is in none of them, because a regulator sets it. The CRU's Price Review 6 determination of 16 December 2025 allows EUR 13.8 billion at baseline and up to EUR 18.9 billion across EirGrid and ESB Networks, and it funds the connection of 300,000 homes. That matches the 300,000-home housing target: the grid plan and the housing plan stand or fall on the same assumption.

EirGrid's own strategy makes the resourcing point for us: the grid operator plans to grow from 1,500 to over 2,000 people to deliver 381 transmission projects. A State body stating it must grow by a third to deliver its programme is the thesis of this article in miniature.

Nine projects went to the top of the queue

On 24 July 2026 the Government designated its first nine projects as critical infrastructure under the Critical Infrastructure Act 2026. They are the pins with the cyan ring on the map above.

• Transport: MetroLink, Cork Area Commuter Rail, Galway City Ring Road.
• Water: the Water Supply Project for the Eastern and Midlands Region, Greater Dublin Drainage, and the Limerick (Bunlicky) wastewater upgrade.
• Energy: the North South 400 kV Interconnector, the Moneypoint 400 kV Series Capacitor and the Letterkenny 110 kV Redevelopment.

Designation obliges every public body to prioritise these projects above any other and to run approval processes concurrently where possible, rather than in sequence. More orders follow through the year. It lands on a planning system that has itself been rebuilt mid-flight: An Coimisiun Pleanala replaced An Bord Pleanala on 18 June 2025, the new judicial review rules commenced on 1 August 2025, and the phased commencement of the Planning and Development Act 2024 has continued into 2026.

Two weeks earlier, on 8 July 2026, came the least covered item in the pipeline and the one that changes most about how a programme is run: the State's first risk appetite statement. Minister Chambers put the problem plainly: a small wastewater treatment project in Ireland takes seven to ten years, four to five years longer than elsewhere in the EU. Delivery bodies may now fund design before approval in principle, write procurement documents before the approvals land, buy land ahead of certainty and forward purchase critical materials. Every designated project must hold its own project-level risk appetite statement.

Every one of those moves spends money earlier against less certainty. Raising risk appetite without raising risk control capability is not acceleration, it is exposure.

Rail takes the largest single share of the transport money

No other mode takes as much of the transport plan as rail, and it is spread the length of the island, so it is easy to miss how much of the plan it adds up to. Put together it is where the bulk of the roughly EUR 10.1 billion of public-transport money goes, and it is the clearest case of the pattern in this piece: the permissions are landing and the money is committed, but almost nothing is yet being dug.

MetroLink, Dublin's underground metro, finally cleared its biggest legal hurdle: An Coimisiun Pleanala granted its Railway Order, the legal permission to build, on 2 October 2025, and it became operative on 12 January 2026. The building tenders are out, with a combined ceiling of EUR 7.9 billion before VAT for the two main civil-works packages, but the scheme's next Government approval gate, the decision to proceed to construction tenders, is still ahead, expected in autumn 2026. The cost is the open question. The only official figure, EUR 9.5 billion, dates from 2021; the revised estimate has not been published, and in July 2026 senior Government figures were reported to expect somewhere between EUR 15 billion and EUR 19 billion. On the current plan the first passengers are not carried before 2035.

DART+ is the programme electrifying and extending Dublin's commuter rail, and it splits three ways. DART+ West has its permission and begins enabling works and land purchase in 2026. DART+ Coastal North, out to Drogheda, is approved and has EUR 93 million of Shared Island funding to bring parts of it forward. DART+ South West is approved on paper but its construction has slipped to 2030 or later. The trains are on order, 285 carriages worth about EUR 670 million from Alstom, but the first battery-electric services have slipped from 2026 into 2027. Separately, a EUR 698 million order for eight new Enterprise trains for the Dublin to Belfast line was signed on 7 May 2026, for service from 2030.

Cork Area Commuter Rail is the rail scheme furthest along on the ground. Its new through-platform at Kent Station opened in April 2025, the double-tracking out to Midleton is due to finish in 2026, and the programme was named critical infrastructure on 24 July 2026. Eight new stations and full electrification of the Cork network follow in a second phase from 2028. In Dublin the Luas Finglas tram extension is cleared and buying land, its land notices issued on 4 August 2026, a roughly EUR 600 million line about to move into construction; a far larger Luas for Cork, put at EUR 2 billion to EUR 3 billion, is still only choosing its route. BusConnects, the bus-priority build, is already happening: the first Dublin corridor has been on site since September 2025, with further corridors contracted and out to tender.

Two long-closed lines are also reopening. The 42-kilometre Limerick to Foynes freight line has been relaid and is due to carry its first trains from October 2026, and the Western Rail Corridor between Athenry and Claremorris is funded to be delivered by 2030. A new line to Navan is further off, after 2030. For a firm that resources programmes this is the map that matters most: every one of these is a separate client and a separate delivery team, and they are bidding for the same signalling engineers, planners and cost managers at the same time.

Funded is not delivered

Ireland delivered its capital budget to within about one per cent of profile, the spending schedule the Government set for itself, in each of the last two full years. The Fiscal Monitor of 6 August 2026 records the State's own capital budget at EUR 7.6 billion to end-July, EUR 0.9 billion or 10.7 per cent below profile, in the best funded year in the history of the State. And in the first quarter of the year, construction's workforce grew while its output shrank.

Set beside those two charts, without comment, the same Government's Mid-Year Expenditure Report of 30 July 2026: every Accelerating Infrastructure action due by the end of the first quarter is complete and the rest are on track.

The record: announcement to delivery

The pipeline's history is public and specific, and it is why the stage of a scheme matters more than its headline figure. Dublin has been planning a metro since 2000. The children's hospital was first put at about EUR 650 to 800 million for completion in 2020 and stands at about EUR 2.24 billion, with 3,165 contractor claims worth EUR 819 million adjudicated as at May 2026.

MetroLink shows how far the stage of a scheme can lag its funding. After a quarter of a century in planning it only won its Railway Order, the legal permission to build, in October 2025; it has still to clear its next Government approval gate, the decision to proceed to construction tenders, expected in autumn 2026, and it will not carry a passenger before 2035. Its cost has drifted with it: the only official figure is the EUR 9.5 billion set in 2021, while the unpublished 2026 revision was reported in July to run as high as EUR 15 billion to EUR 19 billion, before a single tunnel is bored.

Water carries the same lesson with a live consequence: Uisce Eireann can service about 35,000 new homes a year against a 50,000 target, Greater Dublin Drainage will not operate before 2031 or 2032, and the Shannon abstraction scheme, Ireland's largest-ever water project, whose planning application ran to more than 30,000 pages, had its decision deadline moved out by a full year in July 2026. Ireland spent the summer of 2026 under a hosepipe ban, still in force in thirteen counties.

Eighty thousand, or twenty

The arithmetic that carries this piece is not ours. In Working Paper 23 of October 2024 the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council estimated that almost 80,000 additional construction workers would be needed to address Ireland's infrastructure deficits, a 47 per cent increase on current levels, and fewer than 20,000 if productivity improved. Government adopted that arithmetic into its Accelerating Infrastructure Report of December 2025, which puts Irish construction productivity about 30 per cent below the OECD average.

The difference between the two columns is productivity, which is delivery capability, which is people who know how to run a programme. In May 2026 the State named the skill, adding Construction Planner and Scheduler to the Critical Skills Occupations List to support delivery of the National Development Plan.

What we do with it

We keep this map for the same reason we keep the global one: it decides where we build our resource pool and which programmes we are ready for before the call comes. In Ireland the useful signal is not the euro total, it is the gate. A scheme clearing its pre-tender approval (Gate 2) or opening pre-qualification, the first stage of a tender competition, tells us when project-controls and commercial demand lands, months before any award.

When a designated project stands up its own risk appetite statement, someone has to write the cost report that survives scrutiny of it. We would rather know who that is before the client asks. The private pins on the map are the other half of that call: the same pool of professionals is being bid for by Intel's Leixlip campus and Eli Lilly's Limerick build at the same time as the State's entire pipeline, and the United Kingdom, our secondary market, recruits from it too, needing 41,200 extra workers a year to 2030 against a NISTA pipeline of 734 projects worth GBP 718 billion.