Location of new Garda HQ poses 'massive security risk' 

The new Garda HQ on Military Road in Dublin. Security sources have raised fears over the fact it will be overlooked by a high-rise apartment complex. Picture: Sam Boal 

The location of a new Garda command centre in Dublin poses a “massive security risk” due to the fact it is overlooked by a high-rise residential apartment complex, senior security sources have claimed.

There are fears that the command centre, which is under construction at Military Road in Kilmainham, Dublin, could be put under surveillance by crime gangs because of its close proximity to the apartments.

Minutes of a November 2015 meeting between the gardaí, the OPW and the Department of Justice, at which the site for the new complex was officially chosen, show that little attention was given to the fact that the building would be overlooked by the six-storey Heuston South Quarter apartment complex.

Of the six sites under consideration that day, only Military Road is overlooked by a private residential complex.

Senior security sources have said it is “remarkable” that a risk of this magnitude was ignored by the committee tasked with choosing the site.

“These apartments provide the perfect observation point for any person who has an interest in wanting to know the comings and goings at the site. This is not best practice,” one source told the Irish Examiner.

“No one in their right mind would build a national investigative centre across from a multi-storey residential and office complex, because any organised crime group could rent these apartments as and when they become available, which they inevitably will. It is a massive security risk.” 

An OPW spokesperson said that the gardaí had been “fully aware of the adjacency of the nearby apartments” in advance of Military Road’s selection and that “this adjacency would have been factored into the assessment process under the security criterion”.

They said that: “An Garda Síochána has plenty of experience of carrying out its operations from buildings based in highly dense urban settings”, citing the current command centre on Harcourt Square as an example.

In 2012 two men were arrested after surveillance equipment was seized in a hotel room overlooking the Harcourt Square complex, with one of the two subsequently admitting before the Special Criminal Court that he had taken photos of a garda who drove a specified vehicle.

The Dublin command centre is host to many of the most sensitive Garda bureaus, including the Special Detective Unit, the Emergency Response Unit, the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau, and the Criminal Assets Bureau.

At the November 25, 2015 meeting at which Military Road was selected, the gardaí’s head of housing Sean Murphy, since retired, remarked that security in the context of the new site would involve “preventing or removing overlook from other sites”.

Despite the fact that security was given the highest weighting value for the six sites under consideration, five of the sites returned a score of 3 during the assessment, with the Garda Depot in the Phoenix Park the only option to score higher with 3.5.

Mr Murphy said at the meeting that security was the “only criteria where there was similarity in scoring as all locations could be brought to a reasonable standard”.

It is unclear whether or not the approvers of Military Road’s selection — John O’Callaghan, an assistant secretary at the Department of Justice; John Sydenham and John McMahon, commissioners at the OPW, and Ciaran O’Connor, the State architect; and John Twomey, deputy commissioner with An Garda Síochána— had visited each of the six sites under consideration in advance of the November meeting.

In response to a query on that point, the OPW said only that “An Garda Síochána visited all of the locations and carried out a full detailed appraisal of each site”.

It has now emerged that Military Road only emerged as an option for the move in July 2015, four months ahead of its selection, despite an initial 18-month evaluation project run by the gardaí and the OPW suggesting the 20-acre, privately-owned, Pino Harris site on Dublin’s Long Mile Road as being the ideal site

Initial OPW appraisals of the move had suggested that a minimum 15-acre site would be needed to allow for future expansion. The Military Road build is two acres in size, on a five-acre site.

The move to Military Road was first necessitated by the passing of Harcourt Square into the ownership of private landlord Hibernia REIT in 2015. It wishes to redevelop the site and only agreed a stopgap six-year lease from 2016 with the OPW when it became clear the gardaí would not be able to vacate that building in time.

The Military Road build has become a highly controversial one, not least because the OPW has admitted it will not be large enough to accommodate more than 1,100 gardaí currently working at Harcourt Square.

Should the new €86.6m build not be completed by the end of 2022, the State will be liable to Hibernia for a potentially enormous penalty fee. The OPW has repeatedly said that Military Road will be finished and fully fitted out by the end of September 2022, though doubts have been raised as to whether this can be achieved, particularly given how the Covid-19 pandemic has delayed construction projects.