So why is it that we cant complete major engineering projects on time and within budget on a regular basis.
Thomas the airport your thinking of is in Hong Kong (largest man made island) and the bridge is the milau viaduct between spain and france visited both recently and trust me it puts anything in Ireland to serious shame.
Supposedly (i.e. correct me if I am wrong) the french government have a department of engineering which manages all structural projects that go over a certain cost. This dept has built up years of experience and knowledge of how to manage and bring a project in on time.
Ireland on the other hand gets a different team of engineers/project managers/financial controllers for each project and thus spreads any knowledge and experience gained from a project to the four corners of the world after it finishes. In that sense there is no real learning from past experience

That airport is definitely Japan. I think it is in / near Osaka.

UPDATE: It's Kansai International Airport, Osaka, Japan.

The Millau viaduct is over Millau, Far away from Spain. It's the "Tallest" bridge in the world.

ok maybe we were watching two different programs cos I was recently in hong kong international airport and its definitely a partly man made island

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HKG_HongKong.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Ko...irport#History

as for the bridge what I ment is its on one of the main motorways between the two countries drove across it two weeks or so ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct

anyhow not the point I was trying to make I was wondering if our project management teams are consistently held together to gain a knowledge base or are the individuals contracted on a project basis

It may have been man made but it was added to an existing island. The Japanese one was sea water and now it is an island. It is 100% man made in the ocean.

ok point taken!!

Hey - there's also the new airport at Nagoya, "Central Japan Int'l Airport", also built on an articiflial off-shore island, replicating the concept of Osaka Kansai. Well, they got it right once, so they (successfully) tried it again.
Ireland sooooo does NOT make the mark, though something far less ambitious than futuristic off-shore airports would do. Ontime trains, perhaps?

so there's more than one bloody man made island airport!!! This gets better and better!! And to think we cant even get Ballybrophy the right way around!!!

the thing is why, no offence to any engineers who are about to read this (I believe you are all very capable in your jobs) but why do the engineers/planners that oversee civil projects for the Irish government more often than not get things so badly wrong or is somebody else making the decisions for them

it seems to me that the reason is political patronage getting in the way of sense.

For instance the national roads authority originally wanted to simply take each bottle neck in the country a devise a local solution (bypass). Then the government upgraded all the suggested bypasses into motorways.

Unfortunately if the government wanted motorways in the first place the nra would have suggested a very different plan : 2 north south motorways (belfast waterford, and sligo cork) and one east west motorway (dublin limerick).