Minister says flood relief plans should not need to be cut due to science centre

By Gráinne Ní Aodha, Press Association

A minister has rejected the suggestion from the Office of Public Works that cuts may need to be made to flood relief plans due to a legally complex commitment to build a children’s science centre.

The Office of Public Works (OPW) said before a committee during the week that it could have to reduce spending on flood protection schemes due to its commitment to a long-planned National Children’s Science Centre.

The science project is estimated to cost €70 million, but no department or body is willing to fund it.

The OPW’s statement came after homes, roads, train tracks and parks were badly flooded in Ireland due to weeks of heavy rainfall.

Asked about the OPW’s statement on Sunday, Minister of State at the Department of Justice Niall Collins said the state agency has adequate funding.

“I don’t accept what the OPW was saying in relation to that,” Mr Collins said on RTÉ’s The Week In Politics.

“We have a huge budget allocated to the OPW for our flood defences. There is no shortage of funding in terms of our Exchequer returns and our Exchequer receipts to fund critical projects, particularly our flood defences.

“So I’m sorry, I just simply cannot accept that from the OPW.”

He added: “We will take action, and we will resource any flood defence measure which has planning permission and which is shovel ready, the government will absolutely fund it.”

The children’s science centre was committed to by the OPW without seeking approval from the Department of Public Expenditure.

An arbitration process concluded that the OPW must hand over the completed building on the Earlsfort Terrace site to the charity by December 2029.

The arbitration process between the charity, the Irish Children’s Museum Limited, and the OPW was completed in December.

Around €4.2 million has been spent to date on the project, with an additional €576,000 spent on legal costs.

John Conlon, chairman of the OPW, told the Public Accounts committee on Thursday that until a funder is identified, he could not say when the project would be complete.

“The position I am in is that we either build or breach,” he told the committee.

“Build, breach, or negotiate.

“The position I am in as of today is I cannot commit to building this without funding in place.”

He said he had contacted the secretaries general of the departments that had been involved in the project and they are “very reluctant to engage”.

He said they had not sought legal advice on terminating the project or considered that at a senior level.

During the same committee appearance, Comptroller and Auditor General Seamus McCarthy said that if no department comes forward to fund the project, it will fall to the OPW to fund.

He said: “My view would be that it would fall to the vote for OPW if there isn’t somebody else who is willing to fund it.

“It has become an OPW project and partly it is of their own doing because of the commitments that they signed.”

Mr Conlon said the implications of that would mean that “I would need to consider reducing expenditure on things like flood schemes, which is something I would find almost impossible particularly given the, what we now know is the climate obligations we have and the climate change and even what is happening in recent weeks”.

He added: “This brings up more and more difficult options that have to be explored.

“I’m also very concerned in relation to the fact that if no funder is found, that I could be found obliged to have a recurrent funding obligation beyond the construction, which needs a lot of consideration.”

Chief executive of the National Children’s Science Centre Barbara Galavan said that while the process for the centre until now was “extremely unfortunate”, the need for such a centre “has only grown” since it was first mooted.