Executive director of @progressireland. Sign up at the link for one policy idea per week.
Dublin via London via Limerick
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Seán Keyes retweeted
I want you to put the word out there that we back up
☢️ HUGE NUCLEAR POWER REVERSAL ☢️
Taiwan approved a preliminary plan to restart an idled atomic power plant, marking a reversal of the ruling party’s anti-nuclear stance. It closed its last reactor last year
The earliest the plant may resume is 2028
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Seán Keyes retweeted
If they can make this work at scale, advanced geothermal does kind of solve everyone’s energy problems.
fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy…
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Seán Keyes retweeted
One thing I believe firmly is that the YIMBY/NIMBY problems we have today are directly equivalent to the land fragmentation problems – and related political economy issues – that essentially all societies faced in their agrarian past.
To begin with, homeownership is literally landownership in nearly all cases other than a few mass leaseholder locations like Singapore, Hong Kong, Britain before 1960, and Canberra, Australia.
Second, it is 'splintered' or 'fragmented' into many different plots. In an important sense, the crazy cadastral maps of, say, Galicia in Northwestern Spain, look like the standard property lot maps in most countries today.
Third, there are an enormous number of customary rules and rights governing how the land can be used. Farm life has always been partly communal, varying by crop, location, population density, and so on. To insure against bad years wiping them out, farmers owned (or had lease/copyholds on) strips across many fields. Strips were cultivated individually but rotations were coordinated collectively. Ox teams were shared. This is inevitable.
So too today do we have land use rules that are designed to express the interest of the broader community, ranging from rules preventing me from extracting oil, tanning leather, or blasting music at all hours, to rules preventing me from knocking my property down to replace it with a giant block, shading all my neighbours, from housing dozens of extra people on my property, or even in some places just against making my house ugly enough to bother people.
As @mattyglesias, @ProfSchleich, @nicholas_bagley, Bill Fischel, @CSElmendorf, @LawHeller, @RickHills2 & others have written, we need simpler, arguably more American property rights, the kinds of property rights that most European countries attained only after centuries of difficult reform. And I think we should look to those centuries of reform as a guide to what might be possible.
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Seán Keyes retweeted
Check out our new branding.
Meet the most down-to-earth brand in the sky ☁️
Today, Manna is getting a new look.
We spend a lot of time looking up. But everything we do is for life down here.
So we’ve created a new identity that feels a little more down-to-earth.
Meet the most down-to-earth brand in the sky ☁️
Experience it at f.mtr.cool/mkztgvguqz
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Seán Keyes retweeted
No one is operating anywhere near this level.
I’m like a looney tunes guy with the eyes coming out of my head, just flabbergasted he’s even allowed to say that.
🚨 At the U20 Mayors Summit, Mamdani Says the Left Has Ceded “Quality of Life,” “Efficiency,” and “Fraud and Waste” to the Right
This was one of the more interesting arguments Zohran Mamdani made today at the U20 Mayors Summit, and a reminder that he can be genuinely sharp when he drops the “central casting” routine.
“In New York City, there are certain words that have taken on ideological associations.”
“Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern. Efficiency… has been taken on as a right-wing concern, rooting out fraud and waste, a right-wing concern.”
Mamdani’s argument is that refusing to engage those issues actually helps the Right.
“If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’”
The harder question is how much of the broader Left is actually prepared to follow the advice.
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Trouble brewing in the maths curriculum... thefitzwilliam.com/p/leaving…
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Seán Keyes retweeted
This is good news and will reduce the risk and cost of building everything from wastewater treatment plants to new homes.
Ireland does about 51 environmental impact assessments per million people; Germany does 4; the Netherlands and Denmark do 2.
Government plans already screen for environmental impact, so having developers (incl the State itself) do more screenings is just wasteful duplication
In 2010, the European Commission estimated that the cost of EIAs is about €146-215 million per year (with the costs to developers--incl governments-- estimated to be about half a billion to €846 million per year).
rte.ie/news/politics/2026/09…
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I'm pleased that something is being done about this. rte.ie/news/politics/2026/09…
Ireland can't build fast enough to meet demand. Two legal systems slow us down: our own planning system (which is in our hands) and EU environmental law (which we can't easily change).
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Yes it does but those benefits aren’t formally counted in the CBA and other important projects that have not gone ahead didn’t get the formal CBA treatment either.
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The Metrolink from Swords is, in a way, like reclaiming land at Sandymount Strand. In both cases you’re spending money up front to create new capacity to live within a 30 minute commute of jobs in central Dublin.
Yet our appraisal process doesn't formally recognise any of the value created by additional housing.
progressireland.substack.com…
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Too few trains to justify the homes; too few homes to justify the trains.
Copenhagen did both at once: built the metro, zoned and developed public land along it.
Two sins of transport planning 👇
progressireland.substack.com…
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"Those people would have lived somewhere." Not in Ireland. Housing here is rationed by planning. A home costs about twice its physical structure. Councils won't zone density without transport capacity. So the line creates the zoning, and the zoning creates real value.
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Ireland's sin is the opposite. Our cost-benefit assumes the same homes get built with or without the line. So Metrolink, which can move as many people as a 28-lane road, gets no credit for the tens of thousands who'd move to live near it. And promising projects don't pass CBA.
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California's sin: build heavy rail through suburbs that don't need it, and never zone homes around the stations. A textbook white elephant.
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Last year I rode a big, modern, and completely empty train to Berryessa in California.
Copenhagen's metro, by contrast, carries 50x the riders per dollar spent on the California line.
A lesson on how to assess rail projects.
Thread below. 🧵
Link: surl.li/xubnmx
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Scores didn’t drop in England, which is one of the few places not to reform curriculum…
Not convinced either way but a full explanation needs to account for England
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