Voters lose patience with long-term projects and turn elsewhere

Fine Gael must have woken up on Monday morning feeling that the voters have given them a bloody nose in appreciation for the heavy lifting they carried out since taking up office in 2011, when the public finances had fallen off a cliff edge and the IMF were in town.

Labour got the cold wind of love from the public in the 2016 General Election and have yet to recover from that thrashing. Fine Gael’s number of TDs has fallen successively from their high in 2011 of 75 to 50 in 2016 and again this time out to somewhere in the mid-thirties.

The public finances are back on an even keel and over the last couple of budgets the level of investment in housing and health has steadily risen to a point where more houses are being built, and additional capacity is being added to our hospitals.

The National Children’s Hospital is under construction and while the project has been difficult and mis-managed from concept to location to the tendering process, no one will remember that in years to come when the hospital is fully operational and past what will undoubtedly be a difficult transition period on a project of such magnitude.

Indeed whoever the Taoiseach and Minister for Health are on the day that the ribbon is cut on the official opening, will happily pose for photographs and take all the plaudits for delivering such a modern hospital which will see young children each accommodated in individual private rooms in which their parents can stay overnight beside their ill child.

And just as soon as the National Broadband Plan commences its rollout to rural communities who get hooked up to carry out e-commerce, the price of the contract will become less of an issue.

Delivering such capital projects is not quick, not easy and not cheap.

Irish governments are not alone in experiencing such challenges, just look at the rising costs of the HS2 high-speed rail project which is going off the charts in the UK.

Protests, promises and delivery are all part and parcel of the political scene. They are each entirely different and require different skill sets and disciplines.

Fine Gael did a lot in government, clearly not everything was popular and some were very unpopular.

Over the course of the last two or three years, they have started the ball rolling on many projects in housing, health and capital infrastructure and hopefully the next government will stay committed to those projects as well as commencing delivery of their own priorities.

Perhaps in hindsight what Fine Gael failed to recognise was the need to deliver shorter term projects which would make a real difference to people’s daily lives, such as breaking the insurance ripoff scandals.

Long term projects such as housing, healthcare, broadband, Dublin Metro, the bus Connects project and protecting the Irish economy in the face of Brexit are all well and good but voters don’t see those priorities in their daily lives or in their pockets and eventually they lose patience waiting and waiting and turn elsewhere looking for delivery.

Now that baton will pass to a new government who know that the public will not be forgiving if they break their promises and don’t deliver.