Up the grand staircase in Leinster House, the TD escorted his group of visitors. Straight ahead is the entrance to the Dáil chamber.
The surrounding walls are essentially a gallery featuring portraits of politicians who have served as taoiseach over the 100 years of the State’s existence.
Between the paintings of Jack Lynch and Seán Lemass, a number of people on the tour stand near the window which looks out towards Merrion Square.
Cameras or phones in hand, they zoom in, not on the portraits, but down to the €330,000 Leinster House bike shelter which caused ructions a year ago when the cost of the structure emerged.
RM Block
Fianna Fáil TD Albert Dolan says he has been bringing supporters and community groups to Leinster House since his election earlier this year and finds that people always want to see the controversial bike shelter that they have heard and read about.
“The saddest thing is that I, like the rest of the TDs, bring a lot of people up to visit Dáil Éireann, and the number one attraction is the bike shed,” he told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee last week.
“People want to see this famous bike shed and that is so sad because there is so much brilliance and history in this building.”
Senior politicians seemed instinctively to realise the Leinster House bike shelter, as an example of wasteful State spending, would become a big public talking point. After the news of the expenditure emerged, then taoiseach Simon Harris described the cost as “inexplicable and inexcusable”.
Kieran O’Donnell, the then Fine Gael minister responsible for the Office of Public Works (OPW), which is essentially the landlord for the Leinster House complex, ordered a review. The subsequent internal audit report found that OPW’s project oversight group only considered initiatives which cost more than €500,000, raising questions about expenditure controls over more minor or less expensive developments.
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The OPW said last week that new control measures for smaller, elective capital projects had since been put in place. It said that since the beginning of June, new guidance which had been introduced on projects costing less than €500,000 covered “decision-making processes, value-for-money considerations and options appraisal”.
There are about 36 projects or proposals at various stages under the new process. The OPW said these smaller, elective capital works projects included electric vehicle infrastructure installations, building refurbishments, signage installations and access improvements.
The bike shelter issue was not the only spending controversy to hit the OPW over the last year. Weeks later, it emerged that a security hut at Government Buildings, adjacent to Leinster House, had cost more than €1.4 million to install.
The then tánaiste Micheál Martin said the amount spent was “ridiculous” and said he was shocked at the figure. OPW chairman John Conlon defended the spending and did not accept that the cost was excessive given the “hidden” work carried out related to security and communications requirements.
“Whilst it looks like it is a fairly significant cost, there are very significant mechanical, electrical, security system costs on that,” he said.
There was also a “significant cost” for a temporary structure while the building was taking place, he added.
Then there was the project to replace an unsafe 70m perimeter wall surrounding the Workplace Relations Commission building at Lansdowne House in Ballsbridge, south Dublin. This was originally estimated to cost about €200,000 excluding VAT, but ultimately came in at €490,000.
The OPW acknowledged there were “very significant delays as well as increased costs” on the work and pointed to a live electricity cable and a leaking pipe that were discovered during preliminary works. The extra works to deal with the cable uncovered added €250,000 to the bill.
Around the same time the State’s spending watchdog, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), reported that the projected cost of rapid-build accommodation for people fleeing the war in Ukraine had more than doubled since the project was first envisaged in 2022.
The report said the initial projected cost was an estimated €200,000 per residential unit. However, this had risen to an average projected cost per unit of about €436,000 by June 2024 – an increase of almost 120 per cent. It forecast that the final average cost per unit could reach about €442,000.
The OPW later argued the cost was higher than originally estimated because of the emergency nature of the pilot programme. It also highlighted “complications around sites, access issues and utility connections”.
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As the political and media scrutiny of the OPW continued, it appeared for a time last year that its future as an independent entity was under threat.
The OPW is the Government office that manages State properties and heritage services and delivers public services for flood protection. It provides accommodation for government departments and looks after 700 Garda properties and approximately 550 State offices.
Its history predates the foundation of the State by several decades, having been established in 1831. It has successfully overseen large projects such as the €16 million restoration of the historic Leinster House building.
But in the run-up to the general election last November, Harris, then taoiseach, promised that if Fine Gael was returned to office, the OPW would be subsumed into a proposed new Department of Infrastructure.
Ultimately, following negotiations on a new Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Coalition, the concept of a separate department of infrastructure was shelved.
The new Minister of State with responsibility for the OPW, Kevin “Boxer” Moran, told The Irish Times while the excessive spending on the bike shelter was wrong, his focus and that of his officials for the future was on value for money.
He said all projects now had to go through the oversight and assessment programme, and improved training had been provided for staff.
However, he said there would, from time to time, be projects that would appear straightforward at tender stage but contractors on site would discover other problems that had to be addressed. He said if he did not work with contractors, schemes would be delayed and begin to back up.
Moran said the OPW would also be overseeing new work at Leinster House as part of a €180,000 project to improve access to the building, particularly for people with disabilities.
The new OPW rules introduced following the bike shelter controversy sets out a series of phases or “gates” through which projects have to pass. These are aimed at serving as a checkpoint to evaluate key elements of the initiative before moving forward.
The OPW believes that this will ensure that value for money is considered at all stages of the project life cycle.
However, critics maintain that fundamental reforms and cultural changes are needed to optimise value for money.
Allen Morgan, a chartered surveyor who spent more than three decades with the OPW and has for years been calling for significant changes, says the bike shelter issue is a “microcosm” of what he had been trying to highlight for years.
He has written letters to the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for Public Expenditure over the last 12 months seeking reforms.
In a letter to Harris last October he maintained the cases of the bike shed and security hut were relatively trivial examples of mismanagement that had “endured for decades”.
Despite scrutiny of various oversight bodies such as the C&AG and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the root cause of the various problems remained unaddressed, he said.
“Traditionally, OPW has followed a ‘budgetary’ model rather than a performance-focused model, based on achieving value for money across projects. In effect, this has engendered a ‘money doesn’t matter’ culture, only budgets do,” he said in the letter.
He called for the restructuring of the OPW “by hiving off its property functions to a new commercial State agency, while OPW’s other existing functions could remain in place”.
“What is needed is a policy decision by Government, emanating from the Office of the Taoiseach, to reconstitute the OPW as a commercial State body, followed by execution overseen by the Taoiseach’s office, because such a move will be stoutly resisted,” he says.
Tom Ferris, an expert on infrastructural guidelines, says the key issue in ensuring cost control in any project is ownership: there has to be someone who will, as much as possible, protect the scope of the project as originally envisaged.
He said that it was deviations from the project as initially designed that led in many cases to costs overruns.
A year after the bike shelter controversy, TDs at the Public Accounts Committee last week continued to raise the issue, insisting it has not faded from the public’s mind.
Moran said while there were some concerns raised last weekend about a new €100,000 bike shed plan for the National Maternity Hospital, this was not an OPW project. He suggested that this work may involve more than just erecting a shelter for bicycles.
He insisted that lessons had been learned within the OPW and new structures had been implemented to ensure value for money is secured on future projects.
Critics of the organisation equally insist that far more fundamental reforms are needed.
