Franz Kafka’s name is often invoked too readily when bureaucracy proves maddeningly impenetrable or governance looks incompetent. But the sorry saga of the National Children’s Science Centre is undeniably Kafkaesque. A State agency entered into a legal obligation to build something it cannot fund and which no Government department will take ownership of. The resulting impasse has dragged on for more than two decades, with the bill for failing to resolve it rising all the time.
The origins of this fiasco lie in an act of remarkable recklessness by the Office of Public Works (OPW), which in 2003 entered a binding legal commitment to deliver a children’s science museum without approval from the Department of Finance, and with no formal appraisal of costs or competitive process to select a partner. The Comptroller and Auditor General, in a report that should make uncomfortable reading for several generations of ministers and officials, found the OPW had no authority to make that commitment, which exposed the State to entirely unnecessary risk. The project was supposed to cost ¤14 million. The current estimate is north of ¤70 million, not including the value of the proposed site.
After the original Celtic Tiger-era plan for the project collapsed, a 2013 arbitration relocated it to Earlsfort Terrace and deepened the State’s legal exposure. Further arbitration in 2021 and 2022 compelled the OPW to seek planning permission and proceed with construction. A final award last year set a completion deadline of 2029. The OPW says it has no money. No department will sponsor the project and it is not in the National Development Plan. Legal costs alone have now passed ¤1.1 million.
At some point, someone has to say stop. The Irish Children’s Museum Limited, whose board has pursued its mission with considerable tenacity across a quarter of a century, is a charity notionally dedicated to the public good. It should act like one. Abandoning what is clearly an undeliverable project with no path to construction would be the public-spirited thing to do.
