Obligation to build children’s science museum shows charity has its 'foot on the throat' of OPW

Vice chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Catherine Murphy said: 'I’m struggling to understand how a charitable organisation can have their foot on the throat of the State for something like this. I wish that the people in my area were as powerful.' File picture: Stephen Collins/Collins Photos

A charity has its "foot on the throat" of the Office of Public Works (OPW) over plans to spend €70m on a second children’s science museum in Dublin, it has been claimed.

The OPW is legally obligated to build the second museum, despite the fact a privately-owned interactive children’s science museum has existed in the south of the city since 2019. Planning permission was delivered for the construction of the new four-storey museum on the site of the National Concert Hall off St Stephen’s Green last March.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard on Thursday that a legally-binding commitment to build the museum was given by the former commissioners of the OPW to a charity, Irish Children’s Museum Limited (ICML), in 2013, a commitment which is now being enforced by the charity following two separate arbitration processes.

Vice chair of PAC, Catherine Murphy, said the commitment to build the museum was made in 2013 when “the Troika were here and we were losing public services hand over fist, and here’s a financial commitment being made for something without a business case”.

She said: “I’m struggling to understand how a charitable organisation can have their foot on the throat of the State for something like this. I wish that the people in my area were as powerful."

The OPW said that it is currently reviewing the conditions set out by An Bord Pleanala in its March decision approving the new museum build, while the costs of the project are “currently under review”, and said that the arbitrator will reconvene both parties “in due course to close out the detail direction of the final order”.

It’s understood that the first arbitration resulted from the OPW being requested to honour the terms of a lease it first signed with the ICML in 2003 regarding the project.

The new commissioner of the OPW John Conlon told chair of the PAC Brian Stanley that at present the projected cost of the new museum is roughly €70m. By contrast the projected cost of the build was estimated at €26m in 2013.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

The committee heard that while a business case for the new museum exists, it has been produced by the ICML and has yet to be shared with either the OPW or the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.

The PAC was also told by Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy that the plan to build the new museum was not included in the OPW’s appropriation account for 2023, a fact the new OPW commissioner acknowledged as being unsatisfactory.

While a plan for a children’s science museum in Dublin’s city centre had been in gestation since the late 1990s, a privately-owned Explorium science centre on a 20-acre site near Sandyford to the south of the city opened in 2019.

Should the new museum on the concert hall site come to fruition, it is understood it would be operated by the ICML, not the OPW. How the management of the building would be funded “is a matter for them”, Mr Conlon said, in reference to the charity.