Cork Event Centre: €2.2m spent without a brick laid — but City Hall promises progress

City Hall has promised “substantial progress" on the long-awaited Event Centre this year, after it emerged that €2.2m has been spent without a brick being laid.

More than a quarter of that — €599,143 — was spent by Cork City Council in the past 12 months.

Between the first quarter of 2014 and the end of 2024, the council spent €1.6m on the project — mostly on consultancy and legal fees.

A new project-management delivery team for the centre, led by city council assistant chief executive, Brian Geaney, was established in January 2025.

Since then, the council has spent a further €599,143, of which €472,729 went to project-management consultants AECOM, with the balance going on legal and consultancy fees.

The Event Centre is due to go to tender, for the second time, in the coming months, following an October 2024 Cabinet decision that a new procurement process was necessary to satisfy EU rules.

Projected costs for the centre tripled, from an initially estimated €50m to about €150m, while the required State funding rose to €57m in 2021.

A further estimated €40m was deemed necessary prior to that Cabinet decision.

Last month, a preliminary business case for the project was submitted to the Department of Housing, Heritage and Local Government by the Events Centre’s development board, and Cork City Council told councillors it expected formal approval of the business case in January, enabling tendering to commence.

Mr Geaney told The Echo that since he established the delivery team, “the council has adopted a more robust project management and control framework than before, ensuring all objectives are met efficiently and transparently”.

Fine Gael city councillor Shane O’Callaghan said he would be “very confident” that with a new executive in place, and a delivery team headed by Mr Geaney, considerable progress would be made.

“I’m very confident that Mr Geaney will see the matter through in a timely, cost-efficient manner and get the Events Centre up and running,” he said.

It is now approaching the tenth anniversary of the original sod being turned on the proposed South Main Street site of the 6,000-seat venue, on the former Beamish and Crawford grounds now owned by BAM, 10 days before the February 2016 election.

But it has since emerged that the South Main Street site may not be the chosen location.

The new tendering process means the centre’s final location may not now be known until long after the process is complete.

It is understood that while the BAM site is in contention, there is no guarantee it will be chosen. However, an extension of planning permission for that site was granted early last year and that may play a part in the final decision.

Promoter Peter Aiken, who runs the Live at the Marquee concerts near Cork city’s Marina, said it was disappointing that so much money had already been spent with seemingly no return.

He added that since the Marquee concerts began two decades ago, it had brought more than 1.4m people to Cork without receiving any government funding.

“We put it all together ourselves with no backing from government or anyone, so if we can do it, there must be a way of doing a permanent venue, and Cork deserves that,” he said.

“It was vision that built the Cork Opera House and the original Páirc Uí Chaoimh was comparable to anything in Europe at the time.

“Maybe those kinds of people aren’t around anymore.”

Mr Aiken said he didn’t know enough about the former Beamish site, but he believed the docklands area has proven it can carry large numbers of visitors.