Stephen Prendiville explains how smart and responsible investment in infrastructure can have a transformative effect on societies
With Ireland’s population set to swell to 5.7 million by 2040, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to use infrastructural planning to support a better future for all.
So says Stephen Prendiville, FCA, Infrastructure and Real Estate Advisory Partner and Sustainable Infrastructure Leader at Deloitte Ireland.
“New homes, jobs and amenities will be needed to meet both basic needs and deliver a good quality of life for all, and infrastructure is critical,” Prendiville says.
“We have a once-in-a-generation infrastructure investment requirement, and we need to deliver it in a manner aligned with criteria that will make it good for all.”
As Prendiville sees it, smart and responsible investment in infrastructure can have a transformative effect on societies.
“It’s about looking at infrastructural spend from the perspective of wider potential benefits, rather than just the ‘money lens’, and encouraging governments to improve how they prioritise infrastructure and support dialogue between key stakeholders to create a more sustainable economy and society,” he says.
Sustainable infrastructure: early start
In his work today with public and private sector clients, Prendiville’s focus is on ensuring we deliver our collective infrastructure requirements to reach climate neutrality by 2050 and improve society for future generations.
His own interest in infrastructural planning emerged early in his career when he was training as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG in Dublin.
“I owe my start to Michele Connolly at KPMG who gave me my first taste of infrastructure back in the 2000s,” Prendiville says.
“I worked on some of the biggest projects in the country at the time, including our road network and the first iteration of Metro North. Then, like many towards the end of the noughties, we left Ireland after the financial crash and moved to Canada. It was there I got my first real experience of sustainable development in a live environment.”
Prendiville would remain in Canada for close to a decade, working with big cities, including Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal, to deliver sustainability and resilient infrastructure goals.
“I was working with cities and municipalities utilising public transport to improve citizens’ lives and livelihoods by creating opportunities to bolster economic development and tackle social deprivation,” he says.
“A lot of professionals working in infrastructure are driven by the tangible impact they can have, whether that relates to hospitals, schools, renewable energy or transport, but it wasn’t until the introduction of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2016 that I really had a solid framework for understanding sustainability in the context of infrastructure.”
The United Nations’ 17 SDGs (see panel on pg. 43) form the framework for achieving a better and more sustainable future for all by 2030. The 17 goals are interconnected—one cannot be achieved at the expense of another.
“Looked at in totality, the SDGs are about advancing a wider sustainable outcome from a societal perspective,” Prendiville says.
“If we’re going to challenge ourselves to deliver sustainable infrastructure, we have to always ask ourselves, ‘what am I not thinking about here in the context of what this project is?’
“It’s very easy to look at a wind farm solely as a clean energy project, for example. More than likely, it could offer other opportunities linked to the SDGs in the context of jobs, skills, biodiversity and habitat. That’s really where the concept of ‘infrastructure for good’ comes in.”
Infrastructure for good
The Infrastructure for Good report was published in 2023 by Economist Impact with support from Deloitte and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability in the US.
The barometer benchmarked the capacity of 30 countries to sustainably deliver infrastructure addressing social, economic and environmental needs, across five pillars:
- Governance and planning.
- Sustainable financing and investment.
- Social and community impact.
- Economic benefits and empowerment.
- Environmental sustainability and resilience.
Among the 30 countries analysed, Canada and the UK performed best. The barometer revealed, however, that—while most countries prioritise governance and planning—the financing and execution of infrastructure projects is often insufficient to deliver positive social outcomes.
“Ireland placed sixth in the barometer, which is a good result, but we fell down in the area of community engagement and benefit realisation at a localised level,” Prendiville says.
“This is really about the idea that a project is narrowly defined relatively early and, while the community is allowed to contribute to the public consultation, it is not necessarily involved in co-creating the solution, nor is the solution delivering additional community benefits.
“An example might be a new bypass delivered by a department: the benefits case for the bypass will be that it’s going to remove a certain number of vehicles from a town centre, improving quality of life for the community.
“The flipside is that there will be no money for the town to actually grab the opportunity the new bypass presents and realise potential benefits. They will get the road, but their local authority will have to come up with the rest themselves.
“That won’t necessarily happen though, because the local authority might have several other priorities they need to deliver. So, doing what’s needed to unlock those benefits might fall by the wayside.
“Put simply, when we define a project’s goals too early, and to the delivery agent’s mandate, we miss out on the opportunity to realise the full breadth of benefits that might exist.
“The opportunity for Ireland is to be the standout country in getting this right and doing this better in the context of an infrastructure for good framework.”
Once-in-a-generation opportunity
The roll-out of Project Ireland 2040, the Government’s national planning and capital expenditure strategy, marked an important milestone in Ireland’s sustainable planning policy, Prendiville says.
Launched in 2018, Project Ireland committed €165 billion in capital investment to fund vital infrastructure in areas such as housing, transport, education, enterprise and climate action at a time of significant population growth.
More recently, The Programme for Government 2025, published in January, recommitted to the Climate Action Plan goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, as well as fast-tracking planning for offshore wind development and increasing home retrofitting targets in the years ahead.
“I take a lot of heart from the Programme for Government,” Prendiville says. “I think we have transitioned in terms of our thinking. We’re no longer asking, ‘what do we need to do?’ We know we need to act.
“We know that, in the world around us, we have a fundamentally changing economy and disrupted economic model.
“As a country, we need to strengthen our infrastructure to support changes on the global stage and we have a social requirement to build sustainable infrastructure for a growing population.
“We need to think in terms of proactive decarbonisation, housing and new communities, the new economic models, sectors and industries we need for our workforce, and our participation in Europe and on the global stage from the perspective of foreign direct investment.
“We already know probably 90 percent of what we need to do, and now it’s about moving forward bravely with our execution–and the social license to undertake this generational build programme shouldn’t be taken for granted.
“We owe it to the future generations to get it done as fast as possible, but, ultimately, to get it done well so that it lasts the test of time.”
Interview by Elaine O’Regan
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