Ireland must look further than the national development plan to avoid past infrastructure mistakes the President of Engineers Ireland, Jack Golden has warned.

Speaking at the Engineers Ireland annual conference in Limerick today he said the Government needs to begin a consultation process on the long-term structural needs of the island.

"Classic mistakes, like the Red Cow Roundabout, where short term savings in the region of £1 million have given us 25 years of congestion and cost several hundreds of millions of euros to rectify, can't be allowed to happen again," he said.

-- Advertisement --

"With key infrastructure projects such as the metro in Dublin now going to tender we must ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated and that the capacity and quality of the services planned anticipate the needs of a growing country.

"The National Development Plan is a good start but we need to plan past it. We need to examine if there should be new regional hospitals and where they should be located, if there should be a second airport for Dublin and how many more or better universities do we need."

He told the conference: "We cannot ignore the structural problems in our economy or allow consultation periods to drift. We need to put our optimism in perspective and move at speed to take the decisions that will keep us in the premier league for the next generation too."

(VB/JM)