Sometimes a reporter gets a scoop that just takes your breath away, even when your expectations are already low. Credit then to the Irish Times’ Ellen Coyne for obtaining just such a scoop yesterday:
“Significant delays” and “exceptionally high building inflation” are being blamed for a decade-long plan to build new tearooms at a Dublin city centre park going over time and over budget.
The 2024 audit report on Dublin City Council (DCC) found the costs for consultant architects for the Merrion Square tearooms had risen from €246,000 in 2015 to €655,000 in 2024.
The last known approved budget for the entire project was €6.1 million in 2024. The local authority declined to tell The Irish Times what the final cost of the project was expected to be.
It is, in truth, difficult to appreciate the scale of the incompetence of Irish public administration, as on display here. Consider firstly an alternative project, the Sunflower Children’s Hospice scheduled to be built in Mayo by the Galway-Mayo Hospice foundation, which will be paid for entirely by public fundraising. That multi-bedroom facility will open by 2030, funded by the public. When asked why the state was not funding it, Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeil said, and I quote, “that she would “love to have the money to do absolutely everything” but said there was a “finite amount of money” available to health infrastructure projects.”
A hospice is a medical facility, complete with specialist equipment and designed for people with highly specific needs. That is costing €14m. Meanwhile, a set of tea rooms that, according to the design photos, simply require an open space and some coffee-making kit, are beyond the capabilities of Dublin City Council, even with €6m to spend. The state is funding the tea rooms, which makes you wonder just how much the hospice would cost if it was delivered by our public officials.
Perhaps the most appropriate comparison is not with a hospice, but with a house: According to the latest figures, the average cost to build a three bedroom house in Dublin these days is €461,000, which is already pretty exorbitant. But it means that given €6million to spend, you would expect to be able to build, in Dublin, thirteen three-bedroom homes for the cost that Dublin City Council is paying out to build one not-especially large set of tea rooms.
Further, the tea rooms, when delivered, will not even be operated by the council. If you toddle over to this page at Colliers you will see that the Tea Rooms (“scheduled for delivery in early 2025”) are available to be leased out by some go-getter of a company who would run the show and pocket the profits. In what is presumably an attempt to entice would be enterprises into taking on the tea rooms, Colliers point out that “Merrion Square occupies a central city location in what is one of the finest and most intact examples of Georgian Urban Design. In addition to being located in the core Central Business District, Merrion Square and its environs is also the location for many Government buildings and departments, National Museums and some of the city’s finest hotels.”
In other words: Once these things are open, they’ll be a licence to print money, baby.
And of course, they already are. As Ellen pointed out in the Irish Times, architects have already recouped fees of €650,000 for the design of a structure not vastly larger than a house. The explanation for this is “exceptionally high building inflation”, but this still does not explain why a structure that’s not especially large, on a green field site, is costing 13 times the cost of the average home to build.
No, we are left with only one explanation: Utter, devastating, mind-boggling incompetence. That the state is fundamentally incapable of delivering even the most basic of amenities at a reasonable cost and within a reasonable time frame. That the people working for the state, at almost every level of public administration, exist in a culture where efficiency and accountability is shunned, but fecklessness and incompetence goes unpunished. That they treat the public’s money as a limitless resource to be wasted at will. That their political masters, across all levels of democracy – local and national – are fundamentally incapable of shifting the culture in the permanent state to one of delivery, and instead focus on making excuses for their unelected underlings.
This is the very state, it should be said, that so many of our politicians wish to expand yet further, and empower to be responsible for yet more parts of Irish public life.
If we learn anything from the fiasco of the €6m tea rooms, it should be that until and unless the culture of the Irish state changes, every effort should be made to ensure that it touches as few parts of our lives as possible.