The Central Bank of Ireland said that it is unlikely to exit a 37-acre parcel of land near the M50 motorway in south Dublin, which is being eyed by the Land Development Agency (LDA) to deliver about 800 homes, for at least a further seven years.
This suggests that it may be a decade before the Sandyford land is redeveloped.
The bank, led by chief executive Gabriel Makhlouf, decided in 2022 that it was going to move its existing cash-management facility on the Sandyford site, which has been in operation since the 1970s. It subsequently acquired 29½ acres of land at Balseskin, Fingal, in 2024 at a cost of €14 million, to build a new centre.
No overall budget for the project has been announced, but it will be funded by the bank itself. It had been concluded that the cost of renovating the existing facility would be at least as high as a new build.
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The bank had originally estimated in late 2022 that it would take at least seven years from then to deliver a new facility.
“Our current estimate is that it will be at least seven years before a new cash centre is delivered, due to the complexity and security requirements of the project. Until such time, operations will remain at its premises in Sandyford,” said the central bank in its latest annual report, published on Friday.
The LDA has been engaging with the central bank in recent years on the purchase of the Sandyford site for redevelopment for social and affordable housing. It is estimated that the land could achieve up to €100 million. LDA chief executive John Coleman has previously said that it could accommodate “around 800 homes”.
The annual report also disclosed that the central bank made a loss of €104.6 million last year, albeit down from a shortfall of €795.4 million in 2024, after an era of super profits generated by the bank in the wake of the financial crisis came to an end in 2022.
The bank had set aside a multibillion-euro provision to absorb expected losses over several years. As of the end of last year, unused such provisions stood at €1.97 billion.
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The central bank generated more than €23.5 billion of profits in the 15 years to 2022, driven by the response of central bankers in Dublin and Frankfurt to the near-collapses of the domestic banking system and the euro and a decade of anaemic inflation across the euro zone.
More than €18.5 billion was transferred to the Government over the period, cushioning the blow after taxpayers were forced to commit €64 billion to rescue the banking system and successive governments sought to narrow budget deficits.
The profits were initially driven by interest on emergency loans to banks during the financial crisis. They have also been fuelled by multibillion-euro gains on the sale of Government bonds used in 2013 to refinance the bailout of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, interest on bonds acquired under European Central Bank quantitative easing programmes, as well as money made from charging commercial banks negative rates for excess deposits stored with the central bank.
Meanwhile, the central bank report disclosed that the value of its gold holdings jumped 46 per cent to €1.42 billion, as the price of the precious metal soared on global commodity markets.
