Children’s science museum: How a 20-year €70m plan became a political ‘omnishambles’

A €70m State children’s museum remains unrealised after two decades of shifting plans, political resistance, and relentless lobbying by its earliest champions

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

The unrealised plan for a State-owned national children’s science museum in Dublin hit the headlines again this week, as the Dáil public accounts committee (PAC) heard that the 20-year-old project lacked transparency, and even a basic business case, from the very start.

Described as an “omnishambles” and “unmitigated disaster” by the TDs present at Thursday’s PAC hearing, one might have been of the opinion that the €70m project will quietly disappear into the night, given that nobody in the Government wants anything to do with it.

You would be mistaken.

The Office of Public Works, which owns the 5,000sq m Earlsfort Terrace building and adjacent site on which they are legally committed to constructing the museum, told the PAC that no departmental sponsor can be found to fund the project.

A national science and technology museum was proposed in 2000 and the OPW first entered into an agreement with a charity, Irish Children’s Museum Ltd, to provide a premises for a science centre in 2003.

Irish Children’s Museum Limited — a consortium of high-profile individuals including immunologist Luke O’Neill; Ali Hewson, the wife of U2 frontman Bono; and renowned barrister Michael Collins — have given short shrift to the notion that no government departments now wants to build the museum, declaring that it “remains committed to working with all stakeholders to advance” the construction of the centre and is aiming to fundraise €25m to help cover the cost.

The estimated cost of the project has risen from €14.3m in 2003 to more than €70m in 2024, which does not include the value of the site. There is, at present, no end in sight for the saga.

Campaign began in the 1990s 

The full history of the project goes back many years before it was proposed by the OPW in 2000, and can be traced to the activities of one woman in particular, a south Dublin resident by the name of Rose Kevany.

Now 85, Rose and her friend and neighbour Noo Wallis spent close to 14 years lobbying for a children’s science museum to be built in Dublin’s docklands, under the remit of what was then the Custom House Docks Development Authority.

Rose Kevany and Noo Wallis have been campaigning since the 1990s for a State-owned children’s science museum. In 1992, Discover, the group they founded, put forward a proposal for such a facility in Dublin's docklands.  

The idea came to her when she lived in Washington DC — where her late husband John, subsequently professor of international health at Trinity College, was stationed with the World Bank between 1984 and 1986 — and they became acquainted with the city’s national children’s museum.

Then, as now, most developed countries in the world had a state-owned children’s museum. Then, as now, Ireland did not. Upon returning to her home in Killiney, Rose, with Noo by her side every step of the way, began to gather information as to how a similar proposition could be established in Ireland.

“We liked the museum in Washington,” she says. “And we had small children and we wanted to entertain them. And they liked it. 

I said to Noo, who is my dearest friend, ‘there’s nothing like that here, we had better set it up’. And so we did. 

An inveterate record-keeper, the following 22 years of lobbying and fact-finding are documented in precise detail in Rose’s files.

She and other like-minded souls came together to form an advocacy group, Discovery, the Dublin Interactive Science Centre Project.

By 1992, the group had a logo and a proposal to make to the Custom House Docks Development Authority (now Dublin Docklands Development Authority) to establish a children’s museum within the Stack A warehouse building in the then newly-established Irish Financial Services Centre.

One of the original proponents of the idea, Rose Kevany, has been wondering for 20 years how Irish Children’s Museum Limited came into being and went on to become the favoured partner for the construction of such a facility.  Picture: 3ddesignbureau.com

The Custom House Docks Development Authority had a stipulation for all businesses seeking to operate on their turf — that an annual levy be paid by each tenant towards a “major cultural attraction” to be hosted in the docklands.

The levy would amount to the equivalent of several millions of euro per year. Discovery proposed that the money be used to build the museum, with no State funding required.

Five years later in 1997 — after four separate proposals had been submitted to the Custom House Docks Development Authority about how the museum could be established — the goalposts began to move, starting with the rebranding of the authority as the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA).

By 1998, Stack A had been redesignated as a 50:50 retail and cultural space, thus cutting down on the floor space for any museum, with priority to be given to commercial developments.

Discover's fifth proposal 

A fifth proposal from Rose Kevany’s group to the DDDA followed in November 2001, dependent upon an application for grant funding of €10m from the Department of Enterprise to secure the asset.

Three months later, the group
was told that preference for the site had been given to the Department
of Arts for a museum of Dublin history.

Then, in September 2002, Peter Coyne, the chief executive of the DDDA, told Discovery that the
proposed museum would be inappropriate for Stack A as it would have been “insufficient in (its) power to attract visitors”, notwithstanding the proposal to fund the museum via the cultural levy.

The following year, the Department of Enterprise said it would now support the construction of a children’s museum at the Heuston Gate complex on Military Rd in Kilmainham, in conjunction with Irish Children’s Museum Limited (ICML), because that proposal would not require State funding.

Discovery was left swinging in the wind.

Rose’s records of a meeting with the Department of Enterprise in 2006 reveal that a department official described Discovery’s ongoing advocacy for their own project as a “banana skin” for the funding of the Heuston Gate project, and suggested that Discovery members take two seats on the board of that project as a “wise” compromise.

The group brought a challenge regarding the Military Rd decision to the European Commission, claiming that, in arbitrarily favouring the ICML project without holding a public tender competition, the OPW, the State body responsible for the museum’s construction, had provided illegal State aid to ICML.

 

A complicating factor in the children’s science museum saga is that a private facility, Explorium, has been set up in Sandyford. Picture: Explorium

The commission rejected that complaint in 2008, and there ended Discovery’s direct involvement in the saga.

How ICML came into being and became the favoured partner for the construction of a children’s museum is a question for which Rose has had curiosity for an answer for more than 20 years.

In her files are a personal note from Ali Hewson, dated October 1998, lauding Rose and Noo as being “incredible to have carried [the children’s museum] idea for so long”.

Ms Hewson has been on the board of ICML since its inception and remains there today.

Meanwhile, some 17 years later, the ICML project has a new home on Earlsfort Terrace but is no closer to coming to fruition.

Absurdly, as noted by the Comptroller and Auditor General, before securing a legal commitment from the OPW to carry out its own proposal in 2013, the ICML was offered the same Stack A building as a potential alternative site for the museum, an idea which would have brought the whole endeavour full circle back to the site of Rose’s own idea from two decades prior.

The consortium declined the offer, however.

A complicating factor is the fact that a children’s science museum was constructed in the interim.

The privately-owned Explorium was opened in the southside suburb of Sandyford in 2019 and remains operational today.

It is believed that entity would not be hostile towards discussions aimed at bringing it into State ownership, but the idea has not been entertained to date.

Still, in 2025, Rose and Noo’s enthusiasm for a State-run science museum remains undimmed.

“It was and is an absolutely brilliant idea,” Noo says.

One that has certainly stood the test of time.