Fine Gael TD Grace Boland has said that a proposed €70 million national children’s science centre is a potential “white elephant.”
The Dublin Fingal West TD was speaking during a Public Accounts Committee debate on the issue, with the government planning to back the project for the Southside.
In 2013, the government and the OPW marked a site at Earlsfort Terrace, on Dublin’s Southside, as a potential location for the centre.
The project, in the grand Irish tradition, has been delayed since the economic crash of 2008 but the current government has attempted to get the project off the ground again.
Boland, however, said the optics of spending €70 million while schools in her constituency are struggling for spaces doesn’t sit right with her.
She said “if Irish Children’s Museum Limited is absolutely going to compel the state to deliver a €70 million at least project on the Earlsfort Terrace site, how can I stand over that to my constituents in Balbriggan, Skerries, Rush and Lusk where schools are falling down, where we cannot get access to childcare and where we do not have enough special classes?”
“Here we have potentially a white elephant project that the witnesses have no business case for. They cannot tell us what the costs are going to be, what the revenues are going to be or how much they are expecting the state to give. I find it really difficult, to be honest.”
“For ICML to compel the state, no matter the merits of the legal argument, and I am a lawyer, I find it really difficult to come in here and find no detailed business case, no understanding of what the actual running costs are going to be, what the expected revenue is going to be, and the witnesses telling us to just do it,” she told the committee.
Barbara Galavan of the ICML said €40 million of the figure will be spent on the building itself, regardless of the end use of the building, and that €30 million would go towards construction costs, as part of a public-private partnership.
She said that the ICML has committed to funding €25 million of the project.
Boland retorted, “at the outset of this (the project) it was supposed to be that the state was going to provide a building. There was supposed to be no direct cost to the state. Decades later, there has been huge direct cost to the state and the exposure for the taxpayer is phenomenal and yet I have school buildings that are literally falling down.”
“The people in Rush, Lusk and Balbriggan want investment in those school buildings. You are in here, you cannot tell me what the projected running costs and projected revenue of this project are going to be, and yet you are asking us to fund it.”
The Fine Gael TD said of the delays, “from our perspective, we do not see any consequences or penalties, and nobody is ever held accountable. Everyone has always moved on by the time they get here. That is the reality.”
“There needs to be some mechanism for holding people to account and enforcing some kind of penalty,” in reference to the never-ending delays on the project.
The committee was told that no government department was looking to pony up the funds for the centre.