OPW did not seek legal advice on costs of abandoning €70m children's science museum

A visualisation of the proposed national children’s science centre. Picture: 3ddesignbureau.com

The Office of Public Works has never sought legal advice to calculate the cost of walking away from the controversial €70m national children’s science museum project, despite the build languishing for more than 20 years.

Chair of the OPW John Conlon, when asked at the Public Accounts Committee if the State might cut its losses on the project which no department wishes to build, replied: “We have not considered that at this stage."

Asked if he thought the museum, slated for construction at the site of the National Concert Hall on Earlsfort Terrace, would ever be built, Mr Conlon replied the question represented “a fundamental dilemma”.

“Until a funder is identified it is not possible to answer that question."

The committee heard that, not only had the OPW never sought approval when signing up to build the museum in 2003 from the Department of Finance, it also had not requested formal sanction from the Department of Public Expenditure in 2013 when committing to finishing the project at double the initial projected costs after arbitration proceedings ruled the OPW was legally obligated to do so.

Mr Conlon said €4.8m has been spent on the museum project to date without any tangible return for the State, replying to TD Joe Neville: “Those are the facts deputy, that’s all I’m going to say."

Asked by Fine Gael’s Grace Boland if he would commit that the OPW would never again enter into a commitment to a multimillion euro project without seeking approval from Government, Mr Conlon said: “As the current accounting officer, that would be very much my approach.”

The committee had primarily convened to hear from representatives of Irish Children’s Museum Limited — the organisation which secured the commitment of the OPW to build the museum at two separate arbitration proceedings in 2013 and 2019 — as to its position at present.

ICNL chief executive Barbara Galavan said “the process has been extremely unfortunate”, but added repeatedly Ireland remains the only country in the OECD without a national children’s science centre.

Asked if she would agree the strategy of taking the State into arbitration twice might not have been effective in promoting cooperation from public bodies, Ms Galavan said ICML had been “left with absolutely no other option”.

ICML was repeatedly questioned as to how it could expect a department to take on the project of building the centre when no business case or financials have been delivered to the Department of Public Expenditure.

Ms Galavan said she had been trying for 18 months to get the Government to engage with ICML to advance matters, but to to no avail.

She said it was “unfair” to say ICML had gotten the OPW, in the words of Fianna Fáil’s Paul McAuliffe, “over a barrel” in both 2003 and 2013, saying the phrase “does imply wrongdoing” and the entity had pursued a non-legal strategy for 10 years before arbitration which “led to a very positive outcome".

Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy told PAC the project had only survived in 2013 as it “was given a life because of the attitude of the OPW”, adding the saga “is a child” of that organisation.