It was supposed to cost €2.4 million but the taxpayer may end up forking out more than €11 million for the Eyre Square fiasco. Lorna Siggins examines a mess for which no one is being held responsible.
The Department of the Environment says it has no plans to investigate the decisions behind the Eyre Square debacle in Galway, which has resulted in major cost overruns, loss of income to city businesses, serious safety breaches during construction work, and further delays as a result of the main contractor quitting the site last June.
Galway City Council has called in the €950,000 bond lodged by the contractor, Samuel Kingston Construction of Cork, when it was awarded the job in January 2004 and is currently negotiating with the company's legal advisers. Creditors have been in contact with the council and its design team looking for money they say is owed to them.
The city council confirmed last week that Siac Construction is the preferred bidder to finish the project, which, it says, will take six months to complete. It will not comment on speculation about the projected increased cost, which Fine Gael councillor Pádraig Conneely believes may be in the region of €2 million extra - bringing the total cost, if he is correct, to around €11 million, over four times the original estimated figure. Siac was one of the original bidders for the project but was turned down.
European and Irish taxpayers are expected to bear the brunt of this blunder. The city council has confirmed that it wrote to the Department of the Environment immediately after the abandonment of the site by Samuel Kingston Construction (SKC) in the early hours of June 27th last. It advised the department that "additional funding would be sought to complete the project" and said it would "inform the department of the figure when it became clear".
There are some councillors and critics of the project, including An Taisce's Galway branch chairman Derrick Hambleton, who would say that the figure will never become clear. The Department of the Environment has paid €3.46 million to date in grant assistance to Galway City Council under the Urban and Village Renewal Measure 2000-2006. Some €2.82 million comes from the EU, the department says.
Initially, the department says that €5.33 million was envisaged for three projects in Galway, some €440,000 of which was to be borne by Galway City Council. Eyre Square has now consumed the bulk of the funding with an overall grant approved to date of €4.88 million. Galway City Council has paid out just over €5 million as of July 12th last, the bulk of it to Samuel Kingston Construction and the balance to consultants and legal experts.
Back in January 1999, when the plan for a redeveloped city centre square was unveiled by former Galway city manager Joe Gavin, it was projected to cost €2.5 million, with a completion date in the millennium year of 2000. By the time Samuel Kingston Construction was awarded the contract in January 2004, the price had risen to €6.36 million, with another €2.7 million earmarked for planning costs, additional infrastructural works and consultancy costs.
The report by city manager Joe McGrath to councillors, prepared for a special meeting on the Eyre Square crisis on July 20th last, shows that the local authority was seeking extra funding for the project for some time. The department says that such requests are "not unusual". However, councillors have been pressing the city manager since SKC's departure to explain what happened, why warnings were not heeded, why certain figures for payments don't quite add up, and to elaborate on the role of the square's design team of consultants in the debacle.
As reported by The Irish Times last July, Pembrokeshire Housing Association (PHA) in Wales issued a default notice for unfinished work to a company owned by Samuel Kingston. This related to a £1.3 million housing scheme in Neyland, Wales. The association had tried to contact Galway City Council to alert it to this situation in early June but received no response.
Pembrokeshire Housing Association has appointed a replacement contractor to complete the job, and says Samuel Kingston is "co-operating with it" to "provide all assistance in facilitating the smooth handover of information to facilitate the completion works".
Councillor Conneely says he had also given verbal warnings to the city manager about Samuel Kingston Construction on June 14th, after he heard about the company's difficulties in Wales. The city manager has denied this. Mitchell and Associates, a Dublin-based firm that was part of the original design team for the square which has also rejected criticism of its role in Eyre Square, says that Samuel Kingston Construction met all the strict criteria for the project and says the decision was not taken on cost only.
There had been unhappy signals on site earlier on. The Health and Safety Authority undertook a number of inspections, and referred one critical report, dated March 31st, 2005, to project engineer Eoin O'Flaherty, according to the inspector's notes. A subsequent report of June 1st, 2005 noted that a report of an inspection dated March 3th, 2005 had not been fully complied with, the gangerman overseeing the dig had no training, and a risk assessment for digging near electricity cables was "vague and inadequate".
There was still no safety representative on site, the inspector noted, and "the degree of risk is so great that training is inadequate, the safe system of work is verbal and the risk assessments are inadequate and appear to be office-based".
The reports, obtained by Cllr Conneely under the Freedom of Information Act, are "damning", he says. "The question is why the Health and Safety Authority didn't close the site down," he says.
The workers were disgruntled, and in April a group of 19 Irish and 11 Polish staff, most of whom were not unionised, had downed tools over lack of payment and reduced wages. They returned to work several days later, however, but it is understood that several who opted to join the union were let go.
Sam Kingston, managing director of Samuel Kingston Construction, apologised to traders who had been upset by the disruption. He attributed the wage delay to a "glitch" in the online banking system used by the company and said that the matter had been resolved.
The Eyre Square scheme is not the first improvement project overseen by the council to go off the rails. In 1999 a major pedestrianisation had to be re-done when paving stones lifted. The project ran 30 per cent over-budget and has been the subject of insurance claims.
The initial tender price for the pedestrianisation was €3.16 million and additional works cost €160,000. The scheme eventually came to €4.19 million due to delays and "remedial works", involving lifting failed bricks and replacing them with new tiles.
Up to June 11th, 2002 alone, a total of 57 claims had been received according to a report issued to An Taisce by the Comptroller and Auditor General in February 2003. There have been further claims since then but not all relate to pedestrianisation.
Even as the row over pedestrianisation was erupting, serious concerns were being expressed by Hambleton and others over city manager Joe Gavin's ambition for Eyre Square.
Gavin was enthusiastic about transforming Galway's city centre. In medieval times, it was a jousting ground and market. More recently, it was visited by US president John F Kennedy when he came to Ireland in 1963.
Gavin's vision was to see Eyre Square transformed into a series of plazas on a European theme. Instead, the local authority has presided over a mess, for which no one has accepted responsibility, and with bills passed onto the taxpayer.
Green Party Cllr Niall Ó Brolcháin, a member of the Galway Environmental Alliance (GEA) formed to oppose the plan, believes he received strong support from Séamus Brennan, then Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach and keeper ofthe "Millennium purse".
As part of the plan, the limestone figure of Pádraic Ó Conaire would be relocated to a sculpture garden, traffic would be altered to allow for pedestrianisation, and so-called visual clutter such as public toilets would be replaced. The Alliance's main concern involved the proposal to remove a number of mature trees but it was ignored by members of the previous city council who approved the project at a meeting on June 26th, 2000.
Mr Gavin is now city manager in Cork and his successor as Galway city manager, John Tierney, decided to commission an environmental impact assessment before signing the actual contract. The assessment was appealed to An Bord Pleanála, which held an oral hearing and ruled in favour of the project with a series of conditions, including retaining 21 existing trees.
Tierney subsequently agreed to retain four more and pointed out that new plantings would result in a total of 120 trees in the square on completion.
The Alliance sought support from the European Commission, on the basis that an alternative plan should have been commissioned and presented as part of the environmental assessment. It also asked Tierney to reconsider its alternative, drawn up for it at no cost by Chelsea Flower Show award-winner Mary Reynolds. The Reynolds plan would have involved highlighting Galway's natural link with the Atlantic, incorporating lawns moulded into flowing waves in a "Celtic-key pattern" and drawing on high quality materials of local extraction and native trees and shrubs.
The local authority declined to consider this, stating that it was bound by tender and contracts procedures.
The environmental alliance gave up. "This was the city council that had been so determined to build the Mutton Island sewage treatment plant, in spite of EU concerns, that it went ahead anyway and lost the EU funding," says Cllr Ó Brolcháin.
Samuel Kingston won the Eyre Square contract in January 2004 and was one of four bidders shortlisted from a group of 11.
Its bid was €6,362,388. Other bids, from Siac Construction, PJ Carey Ltd and Coffey Construction Ltd, varied between €6.7 million and €6.8 million.
Target completion date was October 2005, over two summer seasons, prompting city businesses to voice fears about the impact of long-term disruption.
In November 2004, Cllr Ó Brolcháin spotted a reference in Construction magazine to a figure of €6.5 million. The city council said there was no over-run, and that the figure included ancillary works.
Last February, however, the city council confirmed that the total cost had reached €9 million - €6.3 million to Samuel Kingston Construction and a further €2.7 million for planning, archaeological and other items.
Samuel Kingston Construction had completed 70 per cent of the project when it left, and it has blamed Galway City Council for the situation. It said that if the scale of "extraneous difficulties" had been kept within tolerable limits, it would have brought the project to a successful conclusion. In a statement issued on June 29th, it disputed the city council's quoted completion date of this autumn and said that delays not caused by it had resulted in an interim extension of time awards to February 2006. The company said it had proposed to accelerate the works on site.
"This was accepted by the engineer and implemented by SKC, but associated entitlements were not being treated as they should have been under the contract, contrary to the statements made by city officials . . . that SKC had been paid all monies to date in full."
The city council has denied there was an agreed time extension and said that both parties had agreed to meet the November deadline, but SKC did not follow the plan.
Former city mayor Cllr Catherine Connolly of the Labour Party believes that Eyre Square should remain permanently on the Galway City Council agenda until the city manager deals with all issues and allegations raised. She also wants the square to be turned into a green park, as had originally been called for, and has collected thousands of signatures in support of this.
Cllr Conneely says he believes an independent inquiry should be held unless the city manager agrees to answer all questions. He wants Mitchell and Associates fired. Cllr Ó Brolcháin says that the priority is to have the project completed, and then initiate an inquiry. He says that the Galway Environmental Alliance's complaint to the European Commission is still live.
It is expected that the sorry saga will be examined by the Comptroller and Auditor General. In the meantime, Galway city centre remains a mess and the bills keep coming in.