Taxpayer foots the bill for storing Gavin’s plants

THE taxpayer is covering the storage costs for hundreds of plants from Diarmuid Gavin’s controversial “floating garden”, which has arrived in Ireland from the Chelsea Flower Show.

The plants, including rare shrubs and grasses, are likely to be in storage in a Dublin garden centre for several weeks while the logistics of transporting the “hard elements” of the gold medal-winning garden to Cork are finalised.

The senior Cork City Council official handling the project said last night that while the plant storage costs are minimal, her top priority is to ensure that the storage time is limited, and that the taxpayer’s exposure to further costs is minimised.

“The cost of this entire project to Cork City Council is capped at €406,000,” said Valerie O’Sullivan, the council’s head of Corporate Affairs.

“And I intend to bring this project in way under that budget.”

A team of city officials is working full-time on plans to bring the garden to Cork and make it accessible to the public.

The garden’s signature steel pod could be back in the city as early as tomorrow. It will most likely be stored in the Showgrounds area while officials prepare a detailed report on where and how it should be displayed full-time.

It is expected the pod will eventually be located near the fountain in the city’s Fitzgerald’s Park.

The Avatar-inspired garden became mired in controversy last week after it emerged that the celebrity garden designer had complained of a “calamitous situation” with the council weeks before the flower show.

Fáilte Ireland had agreed to cover 83% of the garden’s cost — capped at about €2.3m — from a fund that supports the development of iconic tourism products.

Cork City Council was to provide 17% of the funding — about €406,000.

The garden was to be delivered in two phases. The first was its display in Chelsea and its transportation to Cork, and then its incorporation into a new park in the Mardyke area of the city.

But just weeks before the Chelsea show, Gavin complained about the council’s “non-communication and... rudeness and the lack of funds” on the council’s part. He said he was personally liable for hundreds of thousands of pounds in costs and that his reputation at Chelsea would be “gone forever” if the garden did not materialise.

Cork’s city manager, Tim Lucey, last week defended his officials’ handling of the project.

He said newspaper reports had blown the issue “entirely out of proportion” and contained a “significant amount of gross exaggeration”.

He said his officials’ primary concern was to ensure accountability in relation to the spending of public money.