Executive director of @progressireland. Sign up at the link for one policy idea per week.
Dublin via London via Limerick
Joined March 2008
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Seán Keyes retweeted
Spoke to my dentist this morning who splits his shifts between Naas and Dun Laoghaire. Has to drive to Naas and it took him 2 hours to get home yesterday. We need good rail now.
newstalk.com/news/m50-2-2320… On the future of the M50 and Dublin transport.
Seán Keyes retweeted
Is the M50 at full capacity?🛣️
Sean Keyes of Progress Ireland joined us this morning to tell us how we can tackle our traffic problem 🚘
Seán Keyes retweeted
Join Works in Progress at Building Abundance: How Britain can flourish in the age of AI, a day of ideas for rebuilding Britain’s economy and state so it can adapt to and embrace artificial intelligence and other opportunities for growth.
luma.com/ria1khmw
Sessions include:
- @Dominic2306 and Morgan McSweeney in conversation on the decline and fall of British state capacity,
- @JohnFingleton1 on the Nuclear Taskforce and its implementation by the government, one year on from its pledge to implement it in full.
- @bswud, @SCP_Hughes and me on why nearly every attempt to get Britain building has failed;
- @rachelwolf on what the public really thinks about economic growth and AI;
- @lugaricano on messy jobs and Britain’s labour market;
- @jujulemons on why Britain needs gigawatt-scale compute, and how to get it built here;
- @salonium on why fixing clinical trials is the best industrial policy Britain could have;
- @MichaelDnes1 on building the first new tunnel under the Pennines since 1954;
- @RobertBoswall on how to finance and power the data centre buildout; and
- @daisychristo on why VAR matters for state capacity.
It will be held on Thursday 3rd December at the LSE, from 1pm to 7:30pm (doors open 1pm for a 1:20pm start). We're hosting it in association with the LSE Law School and School of Public Policy. Tickets are free.
See you there!
luma.com/ria1khmw
This is the key chart. If you keep slamming cars into the M50, throughput drops a little bit but average speed drops a lot. In a couple of years the whole thing could move at 30kph
Seán Keyes retweeted
I've been storing this one for quite a while!
We now officially supply chemically pure grade methane in California with our partner @westairgases. Photos are with our first externalized six pack during the spring.
An insane amount of hard work went into making this happen. I try not to think too much about the blood sweat and tears of the last five years but this milestone makes it particularly sweet.
westairgases.com/news/terraf…
Terraform is hiring! If you're an ambitious technically minded savant, Terraform is an incredible place to get exposed to every aspect of building a hardware business from sales and hiring to design test and analysis!
Seán Keyes retweeted
This is a very pithy explanation of why the 'induced demand' objection to roadbuilding isn't as powerful as anti-car campaigners believe.
progressireland.substack.com…
Europe missed the last tech wave, but it doesn’t need to miss this one. We just need loads and loads of energy and computers. We can do this
The Red Cow (m50 between the N4 and N7) can take around 6,100 vehicles per hour at its busiest. It currently operates at close to that limit for most of the working day. On our trajectory, in five years rush hour will soon last from before 6am till about 7pm.
We have less orbital motorway around Dublin than almost everywhere else.
For cities of between 1.8 and 3.7 million in Europe, we have around half as much as the average. Only Copenhagen and Stockholm have as little or less than we do. In North America and Australasia, it's three times as much.
People often say that if we build more roads, more people will use them. If we build a new railway, more people will use it. If we build a new hospital, more patients will use it. That's why we need to build them.
We need around 700,000 more homes in Greater Dublin by the 2050s. We need more roads. But we need more than just more roads.
progressireland.substack.com…
The Red Cow is the centre of Ireland. It’s where Ireland’s most populous regions meet its biggest city. And it’s full up.
On the topic of trust in government, Ben and Joe are worth reading
I thoroughly endorse this. I've gone on a journey around the legitimacy of public action a bit like the famous 'Midwit' meme.
I'd say that I started most of my policy thinking in 2012-2016 thinking that it was embarrassing and low skill when governments failed the 'Daily Mail' test or did things which the general public would be outraged by (the guy on the left).
I then went through a 'Midwit' phase 2017-2021 (roughly) where I started to think something like 'the world is complex, governments do complex things, not every part of that can be publicly legitimate - some bits have to be a kind of intra-elite deal on what best governance looks like' (the guy in the middle).
Following the pandemic (2022-present) I've now ended up where Ben is describing. It's clear that in doing the kind of policymaking I'm talking about above, states have voluntarily signed away their legitimacy and with that their capacity to decisively act, and are low grade. We're in a kind of 'developing economy' model of state capacity, where we can and should only pursue highly legitimate policies in a legitimate way, making the case on their merits rather than on technocracy, and not acting when that can't be done. Policy elites should have much more reverence for democracy and the will of the public, including their expressed and implicit objectives, because although departing from that at the margin is cheap, the cumulative effect of doing that over and over has taken us to a disastrous place (this is what the guy on the right thinks).
Seán Keyes retweeted
I have a special fondness for niche professional prizes.
An honour to be a finalist for Ireland's fiscal policy research award!
Congrats @Sam__Enright, finalist in the Foundation for Fiscal Studies’ Miriam Hederman O’Brien prize. Link to his award-nominated piece below
