Legal advice on extra funding for Events Centre project in Cork

Key legal advice is expected within days to determine if the State can plough another €10m into the Events Centre project in Cork.

Tánaiste Simon Coveney said he is hopeful the advice will clear the way for the Government to increase its contribution from €20m to €30m in the near €80m project without the need for a new tendering process.

However, he said if the legal advice flags “further added complexities”, the Government will have to deal with those.

Mr Coveney’s comments come as planners continue to assess the planning application lodged in August by developers BAM for an enlarged 6,000-capacity event centre on the former Beamish and Crawford site.

It will be four years this December since €20m in State aid — €12m from government and €8m from Cork City Council — was sanctioned after BAM won a competitive tender bid.

Former taoiseach Enda Kenny turned the sod on the site in February 2016. However, when venue operator Live Nation came on board, a redesign was ordered to make the venue financially viable, and costs soared.

It led to a request from the developers for an additional €10m of State funding, which triggered protracted and complex technical and legal assessments and analysis of the entire project.

BAM and Live Nation have since committed at least another €10m to the project. However, the Government can not make a decision on the increased State funding until it gets legal advice on the impact it might have on the integrity of the original tender process.

Mr Coveney said the Attorney General’s office, the chief state solicitor’s office, and two senior counsels have been working on the legal advice for some time.

I really hope to get some certainty on this before the end of September. People are under pressure to get that done,” he said. “When all of this is written about and people understand the detail, they will realise the complexity of the legal clarification that we are asking for at the moment.

Separately, Cork City Council is applying to the new urban renewal fund to help build ‘supporting’ infrastructure — footpaths, bridges and lighting — in the public realm around the events centre site. Decisions on that are expected by the end of October.

Mr Coveney said: “Everybody is pushing this in the right direction, but you do have my office, the Departments of Arts, of Housing and Local Government, City Hall and its management, the Attorney General’s office and the Department of Public Expenditure watching what’s happening here and you have two very large companies that have to report back to boards in the Netherlands and the US in terms of increased funding that they have agreed to put into this project.

“There are lots of moving parts there and lots of levers, some of which I control and influence and others I don’t. But they are all pulling this project in the right direction, which is a positive direction.”