When Allen Morgan went public about waste in the public sector, he was hoping the political establishment might sit up and take notice.
He had been working in the Office of Public Works (OPW) for 37 years, close to four decades during which he had seen a litany of questionable spending and ill-considered property deals.
Shortly before his retirement in 2017, Mr Morgan, then a senior valuer, prepared an internal report with a colleague which they called the “five case review”.
It was an examination of five property deals the OPW, which is essentially the State’s property manager, had been involved in, none of which had turned out well for the Irish taxpayer.
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He went public about it on an RTÉ Investigates programme in 2021. It generated headlines for a few days and questions were asked by the Public Accounts Committee but, like most stories, it quickly faded from memory.
Three years later, Allen Morgan looks on with a wry eye as the spotlight lands squarely on the OPW once more.
The renewed interest is not down to any of the questionable land deals or property purchases Mr Morgan could highlight, some of which involved millions of euros. It was down to the construction of a €335,000 bike shelter at Leinster House, as first revealed in The Irish Times last weekend.
The story was picked up by the Guardian and the BBC. Sinn Féin used it in social media attacks on the Government. A review was quickly ordered by Minister of State with responsibility for the OPW Kieran O’Donnell. Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan said he was “shocked”. Even Taoiseach Simon Harris managed to find time in a busy schedule that took him to Ukraine this week to say the costs were “inexplicable and inexcusable”.
For its part, the OPW defended the spending on the bicycle shelter, saying it was “procured via a framework agreement and complies with public procurement and planning guidelines”. The office added that it “recognises the importance of ensuring that public money is spent transparently”.
Mr Morgan said the bike shelter story was a “microcosm” of what he had been trying to bring into the open. “People see the €335,000 as the value of a house and that really rings home,” he said, “they know you could get 20 bike sheds for that price.
“And it was the same with the famous printer that didn’t fit into Leinster House. It’s often that type of thing that gets attention, it’s not always the bigger things.
“Sometimes, huge figures can be flashing around, and it seems like nobody cares. But whatever it does cost, it seems almost an irrelevance to the OPW – it’s not value-for-money driven, and it’s been the same with many projects.
“Does it count as incompetence or a lack of caring? Ultimately, the OPW know they can always spend more money to sort it out.”
Mr Morgan’s five-case review examined five specific deals, each a catalogue of poor decisions and waste.
There was the €5.5 million paid for eight old apartments beside the National Gallery in Dublin, which included a fee payment of €550,000.
There was the disastrous purchase of agricultural land at Thornton Hall in north Dublin for a “super-prison” at a “grossly excessive” price of almost €30 million. The property was most recently valued at €6.5 million.
“We were just asked for examples,” Mr Morgan said. “We didn’t think there was much point in giving 20 and we certainly could have.”
The issues were long standing. In 2004 the OPW estimated the cost of a flood relief scheme in Co Kilkenny would be €13 million. By the time costs had risen to €48 million, the then comptroller and auditor general John Purcell said the figures involved seemed to be a “movable feast”.
Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness remembers it well describing it at the time as “beyond belief”. He said when the Kilkenny scheme in his constituency first came on the radar, there had been talk it might cost as little as €4 million or €5 million. The project is still often referenced as a “how not to do something” guide by some politicians and public servants.
As a member and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Mr McGuinness said he had seen so many reports on ill-judged public spending that “you wouldn’t fit them all in Leinster House”.
“Every successive government has ignored any serious reform of how money is spent in the public sector,” he said. “We have this bicycle shed [on one hand] and the children’s hospital at the other extreme, and nothing much ever seems to change.”
Mr McGuinness said any company that took the approach of public bodies like the OPW would not remain in business very long. “They don’t seem to have any interest in putting in a system that prevents at least some of this,” he said.
The issues highlighted by Mr Morgan continued after his retirement.
A “mismeasurement” of office space at Miesian Plaza, the Baggot Street building that is now home to the Department of Health, created a €10 million overpayment for rent. A compromise deal was later agreed between the OPW and the landlord.
Two years ago An Garda Síochána moved into a newly constructed €86.6 million command centre in Kilmainham in Dublin. By the time they took up residence, the building was already too small to fit all who were supposed to move.
Earlier this year, planning permission was granted for a new family court complex to be built on a long-empty site at Hammond Lane beside the Four Courts in Dublin. Ballooning construction costs have seen the project significantly scaled back and the prime piece of land will never be developed to its full potential.
“When the budget was chopped, they reduced the size of the building. Now, most of the opportunity of that site is gone,” said Mr Morgan. “We need to be building it in such a way that we can come back and better use that land.”
Mr Morgan said it had been the same situation with the new Garda building in Kilmainham, the site for which was always a “suboptimal” choice.
“It was never a chosen site; it wasn’t a candidate at first. We were looking at sites of 10 acres and upwards, albeit slightly more remote [from the city centre],” he said.
“The idea [of that] was that you would have space to build as and when extra needs arose. Every bad decision like that involves more money, more cost, more planning and more time.”
In late July Allen Morgan gave his views on another OPW entanglement. This time, it was the site of the National Concert Hall and plans for a new children’s science museum in Dublin.
RTÉ Prime Time reported on how the OPW had been left exposed to an enormous compensation payment if it backed out of the project. Legal opinion concluded that “in theory” the arbitrator should award the children’s museum the costs of constructing the museum “which may be as high as €26 million”.
The OPW has now been left with no choice but to proceed with the project irrespective of whether it remains good value or is in the right location.
“It’s in the same realms of overspending again – I was shown a copy of that legal opinion, and I just remember wondering how did we get here, how did it come to be like that?” said Mr Morgan. “The cost of the project for the children’s museum is sitting at the moment at an estimated €70 million, and it could easily end up €100 million.
“I don’t know how to solve it.”
The retired valuer has pointed to models in other countries where a different type of agency – akin to a commercial semi-State – might take over property management on behalf of the State.
“I really don’t know how you fix it,” he said.
“I have always said perhaps you could go to a system where you have a semi-autonomous body with specialists rather than generalists.”
He dismissed the recent proposal by Simon Harris to establish a new department of infrastructure that would take the lead on delivering capital projects.
“A department of infrastructure is just moving civil servants around into a different formation,” he said.
For Mr McGuinness, a long political life spent poring over public expenditure and waste has convinced him of one thing: “It will happen again.”
“We will hear about the next pot of money, then the caravan moves on and we are right back with the same problems next year,” he said.
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