The €336,000 Irish Bike Shed and Other Public Spending Puzzles

A few weeks ago, the Irish economist David McWilliams published a column in the Irish Times that stopped me mid-scroll. The headline: "Is Ireland the worst run country in Europe?" His argument was simple and devastating. Ireland has more money than it's ever had (largely from multinational corporation tax, which has gone from €4.6 billion in 2014 to €32.9 billion in 2025, a 700% increase in a decade), and it's wasting it at a pace that should embarrass everyone involved. MetroLink, planned since 2000, has consumed €200 million of public money without starting any construction. The National Children's Hospital went from a €650 million budget to €2.24 billion. Housing budgets have gone from €1 billion to €8-9 billion a year, and homelessness just hit a record 17,308 people. He asked a question that I haven't been able to stop thinking about: "When was the last time you heard that a senior public servant lost their job or got demoted for missing targets?"

I read this from my house in Massachusetts, where I pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country, where the state spent $3.2 billion more than it budgeted last year, and where the legislature hasn't been independently audited since 1922. And I thought: wait, this sounds really familiar.

I moved to Massachusetts from Ireland a few years ago. I love both places. But I've spent the last while putting the infrastructure and spending numbers next to each other, and the similarities are uncomfortable.

Start with transit. In Ireland, a quarter-century and €200 million has been spent planning MetroLink, Dublin's long-promised metro, with nothing to show for it. Not a single meter of track. The projected cost has ballooned to somewhere between €9.5 billion and €23 billion, and at €505 million per kilometer it would cost eight times more than building the equivalent in Madrid. The Luas extensions ran nearly three times over budget. The Dublin Tunnel cost almost double its original estimate. A planned Dart underground was shelved after €47 million was spent on reports.

In Massachusetts, there's a version of this that looks eerily similar. The MBTA, Boston's public transit system, has a $24.5 billion state-of-good-repair backlog, meaning that's how much it would cost just to fix what's already broken. The system was so dangerous that the Federal Transit Administration launched a safety investigation in 2022 after a pattern of derailments, collisions, and fatalities, and came close to taking it over entirely (as it did with the DC Metro in 2015). The Green Line Extension, a relatively modest light rail project, ballooned from $1.4 billion to a projected $3 billion before being restructured and scaled down. Escalators and elevators were cut to make the numbers work. South Coast Rail was projected at $2.2 billion for completion by 2022. Phase 1 finally opened in March 2025 at $1.1 billion, with Phase 2 unfunded at $3.4 billion total.

And then there's the story that captures the whole problem in miniature. Back in Ireland, the Dáil bike shed is a €336,000 bicycle shelter at the back of Leinster House that stores 18 bikes, built with Irish granite and glass "carefully selected for compatibility with the historic setting." The Taoiseach called the cost "extortionate." Then a few weeks later it emerged that the security hut next door had cost €1.4 million. These numbers are small compared to MetroLink, but they capture something McWilliams is getting at: when there's no culture of cost control, it infects everything, from billion-euro rail projects down to a roof over a bike rack.

On housing, the parallels are just as sharp. Ireland's rents are up 115% since 2010 and a couple needs a combined salary of €108,000 to €146,000 to afford a two-bed apartment. Massachusetts needs a household income of $162,000 to afford an "entry-level" home, up from $98,000 just four years ago. Ireland's housing budgets have gone from €1 billion in 2015 to €8-9 billion, and homelessness just hit a record 17,308. Massachusetts is spending nearly $1 billion a year on emergency shelters alone, and homelessness has risen 53% to roughly 29,300, nearly three times the national rate. Both places have announced ambitious building plans with big numbers and specific targets. Both miss those targets every year.

And on budget discipline, this is where it gets properly strange. McWilliams points out that 90% of Ireland's volatile corporation tax windfall is being spent, and if you strip out the corp tax entirely, Ireland is overspending by about €14 billion. Massachusetts passed a new millionaire surtax in 2022, started collecting around $2.5 billion a year in fresh revenue, and immediately consumed it all through supplemental budgets. The state finished FY2025 at $64 billion, $3.2 billion above the enacted budget, driven by 10.9% spending growth through supplemental appropriations that were supposed to be modest tune-ups. A Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation report warned of a projected $3 billion structural deficit.

Both places have the same disease: abundant revenue removing the pressure to be disciplined. When there's always more money coming in, nobody has to make hard choices about what works and what doesn't.

McWilliams' most cutting line is this: "There is no cost control in Ireland. In fact there isn't much control of any sort — cost or quality. Money comes in, it is spent and no one seems to care about what we are getting for this spending."

At least in Ireland, you can see the waste. The numbers are public. The Comptroller and Auditor General can audit government spending. Journalists can request documents. The Dáil debates these figures. It's infuriating, but it's visible.

In Massachusetts, you can't see the receipts.

Massachusetts is the only state in America where all three branches of government, the governor's office, the legislature, and the judiciary, are exempt from public records law. The legislature hasn't been independently audited since 1922. In 2024, 72% of voters approved a ballot question authorizing the State Auditor to audit the legislature. Every municipality voted yes. The legislature said no. They're currently fighting it in the Supreme Judicial Court.

So when I read McWilliams asking "is there no cost control?" about Ireland, I think: at least you know there's no cost control. In Massachusetts, the system is specifically designed to prevent you from finding out whether there is or isn't. That's arguably a worse kind of problem.

Ireland wastes money and complains about it publicly. Massachusetts wastes money and locks the door on anyone trying to measure how much.

I wondered if this was just a Massachusetts problem or a regional one. The short answer: all of New England is expensive, all of it has a housing crisis, but Massachusetts is the accountability outlier.

Connecticut spends about $6,873 per capita, roughly double the national average, and just voted to blow through its own constitutional spending cap. Rhode Island has a $398 million projected deficit and its own infrastructure scandal (a soccer stadium announced at $80 million that will cost taxpayers $132 million over 30 years). New Hampshire runs lean, with no income tax and no sales tax, but relies so heavily on property taxes that affordability is still a crisis.

They all have problems. But Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont all have legislatures subject to some form of public records or transparency requirement. They can all be audited. Their spending overruns are, at minimum, public knowledge. Only Massachusetts has structurally locked the door.

This is the part that made me want to write this post. Because while Ireland and Massachusetts are both stuck in the same cycle of spending more, getting less, and shrugging, somebody else looked at the exact same problem and had a genuinely big idea.

Mark Carney became Prime Minister of Canada in September 2025. He's a former central banker who ran the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England, and he looked at the infrastructure mess in Canada and asked a different question than anyone in Ireland or Massachusetts seems to be asking. Instead of "how do we spend more?" he asked "why does everything we spend money on take so long and cost so much?" And then he actually tried to answer it. His conclusion: the system itself is the problem. Not the funding, not the ambition, not the plans. The process. So instead of pouring more money into the same broken machinery, he set about redesigning the machinery.

In April 2026, he launched a $51 billion infrastructure fund, nearly doubling the rate of investment compared to the previous eight years. But the money isn't the radical part. The radical part is Bill C-5, the Building Canada Act, which passed last June. It lets the federal cabinet select "nation-building" projects, approve them upfront, and override federal laws, environmental reviews, and the permitting process to cut approval times from five years to two. One project, one review. Instead of federal and provincial approvals happening sequentially, which is how you end up spending 25 years planning MetroLink, they're merged into a single process.

He created a Major Projects Office that gives departments 60-day clocks to deliver regulatory cuts. He signed provincial agreements to prevent duplicative reviews. And just this week, he announced Canada's first sovereign wealth fund, $25 billion, independently governed, partnered with the private sector, to finance energy, infrastructure, and critical minerals projects.

Now, it's six months old. Nobody knows if it works yet. Canadian policy observers are already asking whether the Major Projects Office is a real regulatory reformer or just a financing mechanism. Environmental groups are understandably nervous about letting cabinet override environmental law. It could fail spectacularly.

But credit to Carney: someone in charge looked at the same problem, wealthy country, rising costs, nothing getting built fast enough, no accountability, and said "the system itself is broken, so we're going to change the system." That's a fundamentally different response than what Ireland or Massachusetts are doing, which is pouring more money into the same broken pipes and hoping for different results.

McWilliams wrote: "What about a bonus for managers if they bring a project in under — or even within — budget? A reward for prudence. Or penalizing managers of public funds who preside over overruns?" He's begging someone in Ireland to think this way. Canada has someone who's at least trying. Massachusetts isn't even having the conversation.

I moved from a country that wastes money spectacularly to a state that does the exact same thing. The scale is different (Massachusetts is a state of 7 million people, Ireland is a country of 5 million) but the pattern is identical. Abundant revenue, rising costs, ambitious plans that miss their targets, and nobody getting fired. And in Massachusetts's case, a system specifically designed so that nobody can measure the problem.

McWilliams says Ireland's issue isn't between left or right. It's between care and contempt. "People who spend other people's money in such a wasteful way are contemptuous of the citizenry." I think that's exactly right, and I think it applies in both places. The question is whether anyone will do something about it, or whether, as in Massachusetts, the people trying to ask the question will just be told the records aren't available.

— Emma Quigley

P.S. I started looking into the audit to write about it. What a can of worms! Still wading through the timeline.

P.P.S. I don’t want this blog to be all negative as I do love living in MA, so I’m going to do a series on CSA farms, a concept that is pretty new to me.

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