If you have a few minutes, then I strongly recommend that rather than reading media coverage of the OPW’s report into the now-infamous €336,000 bike shed at Leinster House, you simply read the report itself in full. It is not very long – just 8 pages, if you exclude contents and costing pages and the cover page. You can peruse it at this link.
As with almost all reports into an embarrassing mess, the central effort of this particular report is to shift the blame. The Irish Times has already taken the bait on that front, reporting this morning the report’s assertion that the OPW actually recommended a cheaper option than the final bike shed, which would have seen it located at a different point on the Leinster House campus. But sadly, that was rejected by the Oireachtas Commission on security grounds. If only the politicians had been more flexible, then perhaps we would not be in this mess is the implied, if not directly spoken, criticism.
As criticisms go, it is a thin one. The rest of the report is essentially a narrative without any explanation: A timeline of when the bike shed was requested, the negotiations about where to place it, and how the contract was awarded.
We are not told, at any stage, to whom the contract was awarded. We are not told who signed the purchase order.
What we are told is the following:
On June 21st 2021, the Oireachtas Commission – a body chaired by the Ceann Comhairle and with 11 members who are listed here – approved the plan for the bike shed despite the fact that no costings for the plan were presented at the meeting. There is an obvious question here about why a body which includes politicians from almost all parties would sign off and approve a plan without having even seen the costs of it.
We are also given this wonderful paragraph:
“A total project cost (which includes archaeology, contract fees, construction costs and contingency) was estimated at €350,000 (ex VAT) following a review of the design. This maximum total project cost was set by the relevant officer within the defined OPW financial thresholds.”
Followed by this one:
“I [OPW Chairman, John Conlon] am concerned that this level of expenditure is not consistent with the scale of the project under consideration – a covered bicycle facility.”
The “relevant officer” who signed off on the plan for a €350,000 bike shelter which his own Chairman now says “was not consistent with the scale of the project” is not named.
In terms of who built it, and got the money, we are told the following:
“In particular, the OPW procured a Multiparty Framework for ‘Building Maintenance Services and General Building Works in the Dublin Region’ in November 2021. This is known as the Measured Term Maintenance Contract (MTMC).
The current framework became operational in May 2022. There are two contractors on the multi-party framework.”
One of these two contractors – neither of which is named – got the project to build the bike shelter. The rationale for not naming which contractor got the contract, and thus public money, is unclear.
But don’t worry yourself, because – naturally – lessons have been learned:
“In order to ensure full transparency and to provide independent verification on this project, I intend to seek an external audit of this project. I am also asking that the external auditor advise me on any further measures that the OPW should consider to strengthen the delivery of value for money on such projects.
I will introduce an additional step in our governance process whereby all projects between €200,000 and €500,000 must have an initial cost and VfM assessment and be presented to the relevant Management Board member for approval to proceed.”
Isn’t this bizarre? The OPW – an organisation with a €700m annual budget – is only now seeking external advice on how to improve value for money on its projects. In addition, only now is it implementing a process that requires that projects over €200,000 must be approved by a member of the management board, which indicates that up until now, this was not the case.
If you are looking for any idea of how this project came to be, then you will not find it in the report issued by the OPW this morning. We do not have an OPW account of who decided it, who built it, or who signed the cheque.
The only thing we get approaching a “blame” point is a bit of finger pointing at the politicians, who signed off on a project without seeing costings, according to this report. However, one might say, in the politicians defence, that they perhaps did not believe that a bike shed would be particularly expensive, and thought that they could trust the OPW to deliver it reasonably.
I’ve sought comment from one of the members of the Oireachtas Commission, to see what he has to say for himself. Alas, his phone is not answering, at the time of print. I’ll update this piece if that changes.
In the meantime, I think the bigger questions remain for the OPW. They will be before an Oireachtas committee later this afternoon – lets see if our politicians have the wherewithal to ask the right questions, and get any answers.