The Sound of Tumbleweed..........

"October and the leaves are stripped bear of all they wear what do I care, October and Kingdoms rise and Kingdoms Fall but you go on" ........................U2 October.

By the way that's the whole song up there, probably Bono's shortest. This October for anyone involved in the Irish Civil Engineering Industry hasn't been a short one. In fact it's a month that combined with this coming November will be dragging and dragging. The reason for this apparent prolonged Autumn is due to the customary (or recent customary) slow down on release of tenders coming up to budget time. I say recent because now it is quiet the opposite to those boom years of the mid noughties. During those good ole days and at this time of year the civil construction industry via the public sector would have large enough capacity of tender releases. The reason for this was that during the month's coming up to budget time many Local Authorities would've actually had a surplus of cash and they would be getting rid of this annual surplus in order to get the same matching funding the following year. Oh how times have changed.

It is now completely the opposite and the figures speak from themselves; For the whole month of October 2009 in the Republic of Ireland so far only 5 fairly straightforward Civil Engineering Public sector projects were advertised for tender in the open market. Take this combined with the approximate total of 8 in the whole of September; then you know where this topic is heading.

Lets consider then for arguments sake and with a knowledgable quantity surveyors hat on, that the value of these projects was / will be approximately, on average, somewhere in the region of €1mil per project - that's €13m worth of supply coming into the civil engineering sector market for a capacity / demand that was of the order of €5 to €6 billion per-annum. Getting back to Bono, "Kingdoms rise and Kingdoms fall"; surely we mustn't let the Kingdom collapse and disappear altogether?

One also has to note the many 'dud' or 'shelved' projects advertised during the year via the 'two stage' tendering process. This two stage process (adopted from EU public procurement legislation) involves the first batch of tendering candidates to be whittled down to a select bunch of say 8 to 12 contractors (in this climate the first bunch has known to be up to and over 40 candidates). This 1st stage is "assessed" on a marking / technical capability system and a pass/fail system which is supposed to be objective but for anyone who has read one of these actual pre-qualification criteria documents and questionnaire documents then they will see how subjective they actually are.

On some of these pre-qualification type tender projects even when the stage reaches past the whittled down process to the actual pricing of the contracts one has noted that many of these projects have disappeared into oblivion and documents have never left the design offices for this 2nd stage, the actual pricing stage. One presumes these were shelved for reasons on unavailability of funding. Has anyone in the Government Departments considered the wasted funding and resources spent by each contractor in preparing these questionnaires and going through the first stage?

Back in July I noted that their wasn't a sod to be turned in the Country and that we need a stimulus package in the next budget to get some form of Industry and work in the Country. Since then my research has led me to the CIC (Construction Industry Council) who have already lobbied the Government last march on this subject in an excellent report ---http://www.scs.ie/press_submissions/submissions_files/29-04-09-CIC-Submission-to-Government.pdf.

However, if the well is already dry and no funds are available then we need to look outside the Government for a boost. Maybe these guys will help? http://www.spiritofireland.org/mission.php

More about Spirit of Ireland in a later blog; as a young Bono has said "kingdoms fall, but you go on" - hopefully the people in the Spirit of Ireland will go on and the 'no brainer' obvious potential projects they have their sights set upon will be up and running soon which will help to stimulate the civil infrastructure sector and in turn create thousands of badly needed jobs rather than waiting on Government and Government Departments to get off their holes and come up with a viable plan to do something about the state we are now in.

Irish Government Needs to Stimulate Economy Urgently

A stimulus package is urgently required for the survival of the Civil Engineering sector in Ireland. Many of the last large scale projects around the country are soon about to reach completion with some of Ireland's best and brightest Engineers and workers with no future work to look forward to.

The Government are now on their seasonal break and with the annual CIF (construction industry federation) holidays pending there doesn't appear to be a hole to be dug or a sod to be turned anymore in this Country.

It is clear that this current Governments 'ambition' all along was to be the party to construct the motorways in Ireland, once that is achieved that will be the end of the infrastructure / road building program for the foreseeable future and perhaps the end of many small and medium sized civil contracting operators. The Government partners are no great help to any further road building and some of them are difficult to understand, they would have us driving around on hair dryers given half a chance!

Are the current Ministers for Environment, Finance, Enterprise, and the Taoiseach not aware of the boost a local bypass construction project can give to the local economy? The machine drivers, drainage crews, chippies, steel fixers, engineers, gangers, foremen etc rent local houses from local landlords, they drink and eat in local pubs and one would guess that statistically out of any workforce they are willing to part with a few bob during the week.

The following NRA projects are probably ready to go to tender but are sitting in some office gathering dust:

N3 Belturbet Bypass
N4 Colloney / Castlebaldwin (Sligo has the largest increase in unemployment since the recession kicked in)
N4 Mullingar - Longford
N5 Ballaghaderreen Bypass
N5 Longford Bypass (bring back Albert Reynolds all is forgiven!)
N5 Westport - Bohola
N6 Galway City Outer Bypass
M11 Gorey - Enniscorthy
N11 Arklow - Rathnew
N11 Enniscorthy Bypass
N11/N25 Oilgate - Rosslare Harbour
N21 Adare Bypass
N22 Tralee Bypass
N24 Carrick-on-Suir Bypass
N24 Mooncoin Bypass

The total calculation for these roads is approx 300km. Based on this Q.S's experience its give or take a € billion in construction costs. I say give or take as this government has already propped up one of our banks recently to the tune of €4billion or 1,200 kilometers worth in road construction costs parlance - http://www.rte.ie/business/2009/0529/anglo.html

The CIF states that every €100 million spent in construction creates 1,000 jobs, so based on the above calculation that's 40,000 jobs saved plus the resultant job creation knock-on effects in towns like Sligo, Carrick-on-Suir, Ballaghaderreen, Adare etc etc... when you weigh up the banks value bailout in job creation terms it equates to a scary figure of 120,000. One could connive to state that the banks bailout has in a sort of a way lobbed 120,00 persons on the dole(?).

The most disappointing aspect in all of this for me as a young professional in the industry is that we have created a highly skilled and highly educated and innovative workforce over the last decade and this workforce will now in the main have to be sent out of the country to pastures new; this to me is the biggest waste.

Why are we letting this happen to our Nation?