Radio review: All these millions and billions are too much for us to compute

Darragh McManus’s week on the radio

Leo Varadkar appeared on The Pat Kenny Show to talk about the cost of MetroLink. Photo by Damien Storan

Darragh McManus Twitter

July 09 2022 05:00 AM

Millions, billions, even trillions: the sort of numbers thrown around in discussion of public finances are so large, they’re essentially without meaning for the average human mind.

Take this week’s comments from Leo Varadkar (The Pat Kenny Show, Newstalk, Mon-Fri, 9am) about the cost of MetroLink in Dublin potentially rising to €23bn. That’s 23 BILLION — a sum so large, it’s virtually incomprehensible. The Tánaiste may as well have said “795 squillion gajillion” for all the context our brains are able to give it.

And we hear these mind-bending figures often: €21bn on the healthcare system; €2.5bn for war refugees; €24bn on pandemic measures. None of it lands and sticks, mentally, in any significant way; it just doesn’t make much sense to our consciousness.

One thing, at least, that we can mentally engage with is why — why might MetroLink cost so much? This is, after all, a rail connection between Swords, Dublin city and the airport. Some of it may be underground, but it’s not a rocketship to Mars we’re building here.

In typical Official Ireland fashion, the project has been in the pipeline for decades. The current projected price is just short of €10bn. But, as Varadkar warned, “an extreme-case scenario” could see that shoot up by more than 200pc. For some perplexing reason, most public works here suffer from this. It’s such bad luck.

“That cost is estimated before we’ve been granted planning permission or done tendering. So it could go up,” Varadkar added.

Proving that the art of satire isn’t dead, he also added a few hilarious one-liners: “Sometimes the cost of things goes down as well,” and, “This extreme-case scenario — nobody thinks it’s going to happen.” Comedy gold!

Meanwhile, the massive total of €1.3m — yes, that’s one-thousandth of a billion — has not yet been spent on facilitating outdoor dining in parts of Dublin. The council received this money from Fáilte Ireland last autumn to transform Capel Street, Suffolk Street and Merrion Row.

Newstalk Breakfast (Mon-Fri, 7am) spoke to Merrion Row restaurateur Gina Murphy, who applied for a grant — and was awarded it — “nine or 10 months ago”. She said: “It was going great guns with the council for a while, then everything slowed down and nothing has happened really since.”

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Which is tough, for an industry hit especially hard by lockdowns/restrictions and so on.

As is air travel, where chaos continues to reign at Dublin Airport.

This Week’s (Radio 1, Sunday, 1pm) Justin McCarthy heard from travel journalist Fionn Davenport about what’s causing these almighty disruptions: he listed labour issues around the continent — striking airport staff in France, for instance — and Covid outbreaks leading to the cancellation of flights.

The fundamental cause, he continued, is that, during the pandemic, airports laid off a lot of staff and are now struggling to replace them. The training and security checks can, for obvious reasons, take a long time.

Also, he said: “Airlines and airports underestimated the degree to which travel would return. There was a general consensus that it’d be about 70pc of 2019 levels, but we’re seeing 100pc and more.”