High-profile Garda bureaus forced to work from temporary offices costing €470,000

Two bureaus had to move from An Garda Síochána's former command centre at Harcourt Square. Picture: Moya Nolan

Gardaí from two of the force’s most high-profile bureaus are being forced to work from temporary office spaces in Dublin at a cost of more than €470,000.

Members of the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau and the Garda National Protective Services Bureau are working out of office space at a former Intreo centre and within the OPW’s head office in Dublin after the fit-out of a dedicated building for the agencies in Blanchardstown ran more than six months overdue.

Both bureaus were forced to move as part of the decanting of personnel from An Garda Síochána's former rented command centre at Harcourt Square in Dublin city centre last November.

The cost of refitting both the old Intreo office on the Navan Rd and the 1970s extension at OPW headquarters on St Stephen’s Green to accommodate those bureaus came to €472,000, the OPW said.

The OPW, which bears responsibility for managing the State’s property portfolio, said that the need for such temporary accommodation had resulted from construction over-runs at a building at Block J of the Garda HQ in Phoenix Park and at Clyde House in Blanchardstown, where both bureaus were supposed to have been accommodated last November.

In an update for the Public Accounts Committee, the OPW said that it had entered into a lease agreement “in good faith” with the owner of Clyde House — a company called Clyde Real Estate founded by former presidential candidate and property mogul Sean Gallagher in 2014 — with the target of having the building ready for rental by November 8 last year.

“The landlord was unable to achieve partial or substantial completion in either November 2022 or January 2023 as originally agreed,” the OPW said, despite it having “intensively” engaged with the landlord towards achieving an earlier opening date.

In fact, works at Clyde House have yet to be completed, with one Garda source saying, “they said we’d be in by Paddy’s Day, but it’ll be next Paddy’s Day at this rate”.

A spokesperson for the OPW said that the body now hoped to achieve substantial completion of the landlord fit-out of Clyde House, which commenced last September, some time in the second quarter of 2023, with gardaí to move into the building before the end of September.

They said that costings for the move “at this stage... are commercially sensitive”.

The Clyde Rd move had previously come in for heightened criticism from the Garda Representative Association, both due to the two bureaus being at a distinct remove from their previous home in the main Garda command centre, and to the fact that the GNPSB’s work necessarily involves the use of sensitive case files, which the GRA said should not be stored in a non-Garda, non-State-owned building.

Demolition of the former Garda headquarters on Harcourt Square in April. Picture: Marc O'Sullivan

The overarching move from Harcourt Square to a new command centre on State-owned land at Military Rd in Kilmainham had likewise come in for sustained criticism due to the perceived inadequate nature of the new location and the fact that the €86.6m building has space for just 850 gardaí — more than 500 less than the number being accommodated in Harcourt Square, meaning various bureaus have had to be accommodated at up to seven separate overspill sites around Dublin.

In its update to the PAC, the OPW said the increase in Garda numbers since 2016 had been “unforeseeable” and had resulted from the implementation of a new Garda operating model, among other things.