Joined-up thinking, there’s a plan

We are not good at joined up planning in this State, writes Brian Lucey.

As the economy improves it is perhaps too much to hope for that the historical approach to planning, of random actions that at best don’t join well or at worst cut across each other, will be supplanted by some degree of rationality.

This lack of ability to plan is not new, although recent events around water and postal issues might suggest so. Take roads for instance. We now have a reasonably decent road network. It is incomparably better, for national primary routes, than was the case 10 or 20 years ago. And yet, the lack of a comprehensive national plan for a motorway network has led to a hodgepodge of bottlenecks and bad design.

One of the first motorway standard developments was the Naas bypass, which relieved what was a horrible bottleneck on the main Cork/Limerick to Dublin road. The road ended 1km outside a town with even greater potential for bottlenecks, Newbridge. When that was bypassed, Kildare town emerged. And so on by increments over three decades the worsening traffic problem was shunted from town to town until the N7 became the M7…which ends at Adare. What a great idea for a heritage village, to ensure it is clogged by fumebelching juggernauts every Friday and Sunday.

It is perhaps arguable that we even need an M7. A motorway standard dual carriageway with oneway bypasses would have cost less and delivered the same standard. And we would have had services on them.

Lack of coherent joined-up thinking has resulted in endless retrofits, refits, and make dos.

Recently my gast was officially flabbered when Irish Waterannounced it was to seek Irish directions for bills. These are the bills that are to be sent to everyone, just in case they may be a customer. Leaving aside the notion of a utility which doesn’t know its customers, we have a utility that cant find them. Again, this is down to lack of planning. There is a linkage here, a depressing one.

In modern countries there are postcodes. We have been planning to have them since 1973.

Like commercial nuclear fusion, they are always a few years away. We now have, or will have soon, an official postcode system. This is called Eircode.

Eircode is a system that has been excoriated by everyone who will have to encounter it. Commercial delivery companies, postal service operators, emergency service operators, even the data protection commissioner have all slated it.

There are alternatives to it, including free ones. These have the advantage over Eircode that in addition to being free: they work. To use Eircode one will have to pay. Instead of looking up an address and finding its postcode (eg NY3-67-QJ4) one will have to have access to the database.

If we had a working sensible postal code system then we could have no issue whereby a utility was sending bills to persons who may or may not be customers (aka spam mail) addressed as “Jimmy Sullivan, Bog Road, beside the turn to the CoOp and a bit on from the house with the big conservatory, Co Clare”.

They could be sent to Jimmy, and then we could deal with the issue of Jimmy not being a customer as he and all before him have a perfectly fine well, or are on a group water scheme since Dev’s visit in the fifties. We have here the Shambularity — a dense mass of interleaved poor planning from which no escape is possible, sucking in resources and hope. Irish Water and the Eircode companies are, I am sure, led by decent, hard-working people, who have found themselves, as have many, balancing the conflicting demands of hyperlocal political concerns, technologically terminally ignorant political advisers, and good business planning.

However, they have been trapped in the event horizon, the swirling cloud of mess that has accreted around the shambularity, and have not been able to escape and deliver a coherent narrative.

Why do we have a postcode system that nobody outside its developers want? Why do we have a utility that has to resort to spamming the population (when it can find them) in case they might be customers? Was nobody thinking logically?