Simon Coveney defends €1.5m for unbuilt events centre in Cork

ENTERPRISE Minister Simon Coveney has described as “an investment in the future” almost €1.5m of public money which has already been spent on Cork’s long-delayed event centre, despite not one brick being laid.

Spending records, released under Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation, show that between April 2014 and May 2023, a total of €1,492,178.64 has been spent on the project, with €1m provided by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport, and Media.

The reported expenditure dates back to April 2014 and reveals that almost €1m of the overall spend has been paid to management consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the law firm Ronan Daly Jermyn (RDJ).

Between 2014 and 2017, payments made to PWC accounted for €483,000 of the event centre funding for the overseeing of the tender process for future state funding.

The need for future state funding arose as BAM Contractors Ltd confirmed that the estimated cost of the project had risen from the initial €50.4m to €65m, due to a more detailed design plan in 2017.

As of March 2019, BAM showed that the estimated costs of the project had risen to €85m.

Susiesfield Developments Ltd continues to carry out a detailed design on the Cork event centre.

Mr Coveney, who was one of those featured in a 2016 photograph of then-taoiseach Enda Kenny performing the sod-turning at the event centre, was speaking on Sunday at Collins’ Barracks after the main ceremony of the National Day of Commemoration.

Asked about the spending records, which were released under FoI to Labour Party local area representative Peter Horgan, Mr Coveney said that the case had long since been proven that an event centre of the scale needed in Cork would require State intervention.

“Cork City Council has been very much involved in this project now for many years and the Government has been clear that we are supportive of putting a large amount of public money in terms of capital investment, along with private sector investment, which will also be significant, to make sure that Cork gets an event centre of scale, that can allow international acts to come to Ireland, and to come to Cork,” Mr Coveney said.

Stating that the event centre was “pretty close now to … starting in terms of physical construction”, Mr Coveney said that ultimately the event centre would probably cost about €100m in public and private funds.

He added that the event centre would eventually prove “quite transformative actually in terms of the city centre”, with people coming from all over the country and from other parts of the world for events there.

Asked about €1.5m being spent without a single brick being laid, Mr Coveney said: “It’s an investment for the future, that’s the way I’d see it.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who also attended the event in Collins’ Barracks, said that in time people would wonder why the event centre had not been completed sooner.

“I think the Cork event centre, like so many projects, once it’s built nobody will be sorry that it’s built, it’s going to be like the Luas, or Dublin Port Tunnel, or Terminal Two in Dublin Airport, or the new terminal in Cork, or the National Children’s Hospital, there will be lots of controversy about it, but once it’s built, people will only be wondering why we didn’t build it sooner,” Mr Varadkar said.