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THERE’S SOMETHING ODDLY reassuring about the recent story of the €500,000 steps in Dublin. Not reassuring because half a million euro disappeared into a short flight of concrete, but because it fits so neatly into a familiar Irish pattern.
A modest piece of public infrastructure. A cost that seems wildly out of proportion. A collective intake of breath, followed by a shrug.
Remember the wall? The 70-metre perimeter wall at the Workplace Relations Commission in Ballsbridge. Originally estimated at €200,000 in 2022. Final bill in late 2024, €490,000. The same pattern, the same rhythm, the same predictable outcome.
Two projects, two modest pieces of infrastructure, two costs that somehow spiralled well beyond the bounds of reasonable. The facts have been well covered elsewhere. What matters is why stories like these keep happening with such a predictable rhythm, and why, once they do, they feel almost inevitable. Because these aren’t really stories about steps and walls.
Every expensive public project begins with a decision that feels too minor to challenge. A design choice. A materials specification. A “this is standard” assumption. A staircase. A perimeter wall. Hardly the sort of things that trigger serious debate or strategic pause. Nobody convenes a risk workshop over steps. Nobody demands value-for-money reviews for boundary walls.
And that is precisely the danger. Small decisions attract the least scrutiny. They sit below the threshold of concern, passing through systems almost unnoticed, carried along by habit, precedent and the comforting belief that someone, somewhere, is keeping an eye on the total. No one is reckless at this stage. Everyone is reasonable. And everyone assumes the cost will take care of itself.
It rarely does.
As projects move forward, responsibility fragments. Design sits with one group, engineering with another, costing with a third, procurement with a fourth and delivery with a fifth. Each actor signs off on something narrow and defensible.
Individually, every decision makes sense. Collectively, they produce an outcome no one explicitly chose. Everyone approved a step. No one approved the stairs. Everyone signed off on the wall specifications. No one apparently checked if they’d ordered enough bricks.
That last detail is worth pausing on. The WRC wall ran short by 750 blocks. It is what one TD described as “a sixth class maths question.” This isn’t exotic complexity. This is basic arithmetic, lost in the machinery of process.
This is how accountability dissolves. Not through incompetence or bad faith, but through structure. Responsibility becomes so neatly sliced that the overall picture is never fully owned. By the time the total cost becomes visible, the system is merely inconvenienced.
The WRC wall encountered complications: a live high-voltage cable, a leaking pipe. Delays stretched to two years. Extra costs mounted, €54,000 to the ESB, €61,500 to Dublin City Council. Then another cable appeared. “This latest issue has caused the project to come to a complete stop,” wrote the WRC’s Director General.
Sounds familiar? The steps project hit tree roots and uncharted electricity cables. Different sites, identical pattern, underground surprises that no one mapped, escalating costs that no one anticipated.
But stopping, once committed, becomes the most expensive option. Redesigning costs money. Delaying costs money. And delays are treated as a greater sin than overspending in Irish public procurement. So the system absorbs the overrun, documents the justification and moves on. Steps are built. Walls are rebuilt. Bills are paid. Files are closed.
Outrage is directed outward, towards “the system” or “the process”. These are useful abstractions that allow everyone involved to be both responsible and blameless at the same time.
It would be easy to dismiss these as minor embarrassments. Neither sum is transformative in national capital budgets. But that’s exactly why they matter. If half a million euro can disappear quietly into steps and walls without triggering a serious pause, what happens when the same habits govern housing developments, hospital corridors, transport interchanges, or school refurbishments?
This isn’t about scale. It’s about pattern. Systems that struggle to interrogate small decisions rarely perform better on large ones. The behaviours formed at the bottom persist all the way up. The instincts that fail to count bricks for a 70-metre wall will struggle with genuinely transformative infrastructure.
There’s an unintended irony here. A “stairway to heaven” suggests aspiration and arrival, immortalised in Led Zeppelin’s epic. The public-sector version is less poetic. Each step is justified in isolation. Each decision is defensible on paper. And yet the destination is always the same. An overrun explained after the fact, accountability diffused and a sense that nothing could really have been done differently. The song promises revelation at the end of the climb. The system delivers predictability.
The real problem isn’t that the steps cost too much, or that the wall doubled its budget. It’s that no one in either process was ever required, structurally or culturally, to stop and ask, does this still feel proportionate? Not “is it compliant?” Not “is it in scope?” But “does this still make sense?”
That question sits uncomfortably in systems optimised for process compliance rather than outcome interrogation. It requires someone to step outside their narrow lane and consider the whole. It demands a pause that runs counter to delivery momentum. Until public systems create space and obligation for proportionality checks above technical compliance, we’ll keep being surprised by outcomes locked in from the first small, unremarkable decision.
The problem isn’t the stairs. Or the wall. It’s how easily we keep climbing them, one perfectly justified step at a time.
Dr Paul Davis is a lecturer at Dublin City University’s Business School. He specialises in supply chain management and procurement.
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