A long-serving county councillor, in the bar after a seminar during the public finance crisis in the late 1980s, offered me the following insight: “you can get away with anything if you call it capital”.

The decade of mismanagement in the Government’s budget and in the banking system that led to the crash in 2008 included numerous projects which followed the councillor’s credo. The public capital programme ballooned and numerous wasteful projects around the country helped to drain the Exchequer.

Inevitably there were drastic cuts in capital spending in the years following the 2008 crash and it is not difficult to identify areas where extra money could now usefully be spent, subject always to getting the State debt under control.

The mistake to avoid is an across-the-board green light for infrastructure spending. Unfortunately, it seems always to be either a feast or a famine with the capital programme in Ireland. There are calls for a dramatic increase in the capital budget and some reckless proposals have emerged. Every politician in the country seems to regard capital spending as productive by definition, not requiring careful justification, and with pride of place for projects in their own constituencies.

The list of silly recent proposals includes a suggestion that Ireland should offer to host the Olympic Games and a plan to build a nationwide high-speed rail network, either of which would help to bankrupt the Exchequer all over again. Both proposals were made by government ministers, believe it or not.

Cities foolish enough to host the Olympics have lost so much money that only two are still interested in the 2024 and 2028 events. These are Paris and Los Angeles: both will apparently be selected, there being no other offers. Other cities whose politicians had expressed interest have dropped out, including Istanbul and Rome, where the new mayor won election on a ticket which promised to drop the Olympic bid.

Second thoughts

Politicians in the cities which had second thoughts were scared by the widespread riots in Brazil during the 2016 games – citizens took to the streets to oppose the quadrennial festival of waste and corruption.

High-speed rail lines cost up to €100m per kilometre and need passenger volumes large multiples of any that are available in this country. Neither minister, in proposing these far-fetched schemes, bothered to include a cost estimate.

But the prize for the daftest proposal of the 2017 silly season must go to backbencher Michael Fitzmaurice, the independent TD for Roscommon-Galway. The disused airport site at Carnmore should be turned into a major all-purpose stadium for the west, according to deputy Fitzmaurice. “It’s a no-brainer,” he added helpfully.

Galway airport closed to flights in 2013, as did the airport at Sligo. Waterford airport lost its last (subsidised) passenger service more recently, bringing the list of airports with no flights to three. That’s what happens when you spend money on facilities for which there is no public demand.

There is already a fine GAA stadium at Salthill in Galway with a capacity of over 30,000. The Galway soccer and rugby teams have smaller venues adequate to their requirements. Pearse Stadium has not had a full house for some years and is not exactly overloaded with fixtures. There is, in a nutshell, no more need for a Bertiebowl in Galway than there was in Dublin.

Deputy Fitzmaurice has, however, managed something unique: he has proposed the construction of a white elephant on the abandoned site of an earlier one.

The cacophony of demands for a rapid increase in public capital spending has found an unlikely recruit in IBEC, the business lobby group. Normally a proponent of cautious public finances, IBEC released on Monday a pre-budget submission calling for the abandonment of the Government’s budgetary limits as outlined in Minister Donohoe’s recent summer statement. There are no cost estimates, or calculations of project benefits, anywhere in the IBEC document.

The list of projects which it would be nice to have is unlimited – a decent water system, more social housing, better roads and rural broadband. But the list of “nice to have” projects can be expanded without limit as we can see from the politicians’ brainwaves – high-speed rail, Olympic Games and a Bertiebowl for the west.

There is only one way to identify the worthwhile projects from the unending wish-list, and that is to assess not only their merits but also their costs in the framework of a responsible overall limit on State borrowing.

The last Irish economic crisis was caused in large part by wasteful capital spending, financed through the Exchequer as well as through the myopic banking system. There is a reasonable case for a measured expansion in public capital spending. It will be undermined by the undisciplined calls for another free-for-all.