Michael Moynihan: Why has the Crawford Art Gallery project ballooned from €30m to €93m?
(Left to right) Rose McHugh, chair of the Crawford Art Gallery; minister of state Kevin 'Boxer' Moran; Taoiseach Micheál Martin; Mary McCarthy, director of the Crawford Art Gallery; minister Patrick O'Donovan and Yvonne Farrell of Grafton Architects at the launch of the Crawford Art Gallery redevelopment last month. Picture: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
The Crawford Art Gallery is currently closed for renovation work, as many readers probably know already.
It shut down in September 2024 for the works, and ‘renovation’ is probably an understatement. As Sarah Horgan reported then, those works will “add 50% more space for storage and exhibitions. A five-storey extension will be added to the building and a new restaurant will be built too.
“Most of the Crawford's 3,500 artworks will be kept in storage, but some have found temporary homes at the Cork Public Museum, the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, and Hillsborough Castle in Co Down.”
That report referred to the gallery being shut for two-and-a-half years while the project, costing €29 million, was completed. Now the picture is a little different.
Last November, Paul Hosford reported here that the main contractor is expected to start on site in February 2026, with the estimated completion date in the second quarter of 2028.
Therefore, in September 2024 the gallery was expected to be shut for two-and-a-half years’ work, thus reopening in — roughly — March 2027. But in November 2025 we learned that the completion date has changed and is now — roughly — April 2028.
Normally the loss of an entire year in a project timeline would be a startling enough development, but that wasn’t the most surprising lesson in Paul's November report.
“Last month culture minister Patrick O’Donovan told ministers the full €93.1 million capital cost of the project includes Vat and a provision for contingency,” he wrote at that time.
“In advance of the redevelopment, Mr O'Donovan told ministers that €6.5m has already been spent to date on preparatory works on designs, plans, and removing valuable items from the gallery, which was built by brewing magnate William Horatio Crawford in 1884.
“An original estimate of €28.86 million was arrived at in 2020, prior to the planning and design phase, and the project has changed substantially since then, ministers were told.”
Granted, this is Ireland 2026, a time and place where money means nothing at all, where figures are fluid, where an estimate or cost can mean just what you choose it to mean, neither more nor less, to quote Lewis Carroll.
But even allowing for our cavalier ways, the scale of the increase here is enough to make you swallow hard. Going from €28.8 million to €93.1 million is a tripling of the cost, plus an additional €7 million for good measure.
(The temptation to suggest that that price includes a sneaky little Picasso, or a lesser-known Van Gogh, is strong, but we’ll just have to overcome it.) The questions come thick and fast.
Minister O’Donovan said the original estimate of €28.86 million was arrived at before the planning and design phase. If so, what exactly did that figure refer to? How did someone come up with a cost for the work before that work was planned, or before a design for the project was finalised?
Yours truly is no financial wizard, but even those of us who didn’t progress beyond pass maths know that an estimate must be based on something more substantial than a rough guess. For most estimates irritating realities like blueprints and plans and schedules have to be considered.
Which raises another question. The minister also said that the project had changed substantially since the days of the original estimate back in 2020.
You can say that again, but it would help to have some specifics about what those changes are. That in turn might lead to some much-needed clarity about this whole process.
Clearly estimates of costs are not worth a bucket of warm spit if they are being presented based on one design — but are subject to immense, sweeping increases when those designs change.
Numbers appear to be conjured out of thin air at one point but they vanish back into the ether soon afterwards and are duly replaced with higher numbers, accompanied by woolly boilerplate references to designs and delays and construction costs and inflation.
At the launch of the redevelopment of the Crawford last month in Cork, Taoiseach Micheál Martin spoke about that tripling in costs for the project.
“Construction inflation has gone up significantly. In my own view, that’s when decisions are required.
“We’ve taken the right decision to get on with this, get it done, because if we postpone or delay, one thing is inevitable: the cost will go up even higher.
“This is essential artistic infrastructure in the city of Cork, we can’t leave it as an empty shell, that would be unthinkable.”
This reason — construction inflation — isn’t quite the same as the project changing substantially since the original estimate, which was mentioned when the tripling in costs was revealed last October.
We therefore have a couple of different reasons being floated now for the increased cost.
In addition, the Taoiseach’s point about the costs going up is an ominous one, given the project is already a full year behind a schedule mentioned in 2024. And it hasn’t even started yet.
Saying we have to get on with it or it’ll cost more money in the long run isn’t the most persuasive argument in favour of tripling the costs either, but the really disingenuous suggestion is that Crawford can’t be left as an empty shell.
Is it meant to imply that that’s the only alternative — we abandon the work before we even get started and just leave the four walls of the gallery surrounding a vacant space? That sounds like a pretty apocalyptic binary.
People are entitled to be told why a job costed at less than €30 million is going to cost well over €90 million. The State’s credibility on major capital projects is not robust, to put it no stronger than that, but this is a particularly galling example of the Monopoly-money approach.
Crawford Art Gallery is a rarity
There’s another aspect to this shambles which should be noted. The Crawford Art Gallery is a rarity in Ireland in that it is a genuinely popular artistic space, a place that generations of Cork people have visited and enjoyed for pure pleasure.
Many other highbrow institutions would do well to learn from its welcoming ethos and energetic staff, and it has long been an integral and organic part of life on Leeside.
The place is always thronged on Culture Night but it thrummed all year round until it shut down for the renovation, which is long overdue.
But that justified fondness for the Crawford shouldn’t obscure the fact that we have a calamity unfolding here when it comes to costs.
Right now the place is closed and everyone is looking forward to it reopening in a new and improved version, but three times the original cost and over a year late sounds like a pretty poor bargain.
And an ominous precedent for the next large-scale renovation project in Cork.
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