€420k bill and still no OPW book

A HISTORIAN contracted to write the history of the Office of Public Works (OPW) has been given an extra €80,000 even though he has completed just two chapters and the book may never be published.

This is on top of the €340,000 Desmond McCabe has already been paid since 2000, bringing to €420,000 the total fees he will have been paid for the project.

Chair of the OPW, Claire McGrath, said a “catalogue” of the organisation’s history will be put up online instead of a book because of the huge volume of information on the OPW’s history.

“We will have a catalogue of all the documentation of the OPW published,” she told the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) “but not in the sense of a scholarly work”.

She was answering questions by Labour’s Pat Rabbitte, who said the historian “is a bit slow at the old writing”.

She said he had carried out extensive archiving of OPW material and also written a book for them about the history of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, which will be published next year.

“I accept that what started to be procured became something different,” she said. “I think the office has obtained value for what has been given.”

Ms McGrath even claimed the contract had saved the OPW money because of the valuable archiving work he had done, which involved reviewing 150,000 files.

A spokesperson for the OPW later confirmed the intention to publish a catalogue of archived material online and said a shorter, less detailed history book of the organisation will accompany it.

Mr McCabe was awarded a €76,184 deal to write the book in 2000. When it was not completed in 2004 he got a further two-year contract for €78,4270. A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General last month found he had peen paid 341,714 up to the end of 2009, even though only two chapters have been written.

Ms McGrath told PAC that he is receiving a payment of €80,000 for work in 2010 and 2011 and €39,000 of this would be paid this year.

Cork South Central Fianna Fáil TD Michael Ahern said it was a “bizarre” situation and that it was “embarrassing” for the OPW to stand over this when they are setting out procurement guidelines for everybody else.

But he did not want to criticise Mr McCabe, who has worked at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, the Irish Famine Project at Trinity College Dublin and the Dictionary of Irish Biography published by the Royal Irish Academy.