OPW ha pagato € 20 milioni per affittare 2 edifici che non sono stati occupati
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2025/0930/1536117-opw-paid-20m-to-lease-2-buildings-that-stayed-unoccupied/
di BenderRodriguez14
OPW ha pagato € 20 milioni per affittare 2 edifici che non sono stati occupati
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2025/0930/1536117-opw-paid-20m-to-lease-2-buildings-that-stayed-unoccupied/
di BenderRodriguez14
10 commenti
This government needs to get a handle on spending before it raises a penny more in tax
When the next recession comes and it will come. They’ll roll out the ail line “hard decisions will have to made”, meaning cutting welfare payments but keep on transferring wealth away from the working man/woman. 20 million is probably about a a fiver a week for every tax payer. Which is probably what we’ll come away with in the budget.
The Opppeedoppee strike again, normally you’d suspect something malign but in the OPW’s case it’s almost always incompetence.
Opw needs to be destroyed
OPW has been at this forever. I remember during the great recession they’d be out there renewing leases for separate quangos the govt wanted to merge and bring together physically also.
Ok, so reading the article.
One building was leased in May 2019 for the Dept of Foreign Affairs and Trade and didn’t get occupied until May 2024. That can be somewhat adequately explained by Covid, then home working and I’m sure there are hundreds of private companies that over acquired space. My last employer took on an extra floor in 2019 and they have about 600 desks with an average daily occupancy of 150-350 depending on the day of the week, despite numerous attempts to enfore hybrid working and get the average occupancy up over 55%.
The other building was leased in 2022 and had 2 years rent free until 2024. It was due to be ready for occupation from last month.
So they’re not throwing money at empty buildings from what I can see, but there is poor execution of planning and fit out, and possibly they are struggling with return to office implementations which make the push to use the planned space a little flat.
There is waste here, for sure, but a lot of it is tied to covid and home working, so I don’t think this is just some ‘public sector fuck up’, rather it’s replicated in private businesses all around.
The context here lads is that these buildings were being fitted out, that’s why they were vacant.
The fit-out took longer than expected, so in effect they ended up paying rent on a building that wasn’t being actively used.
The headline implies that there were two perfectly good buildings just sitting there ready to go and weren’t being used.
Is it a lot of money gone to waste? Yes. Is it for the reason you thought? No.
Wait, is this another clanger by Fine Gael’s Patrick O’Donovan??
I doubt it. After the €335,000 he spent on a bike shed at Leinster House, and then the failed Arts Council IT system, costing nearly €6.7 million, was abandoned, with €5.3 million written off, third times a charm?
Interestingly the RTÉ article doesnt mention anyone at all. Nobody in govt over saw this, nobody in govt allowed it, and nobody in govt has defended it.
A mystery..
r/Ireland – “OMG look at how inefficient these State bodies are”
Also
r/Ireland – “We need to get rid of this neoliberal government and put the State in charge of everything
The OPW need their budget cut in half. The waste they create compared to their responsibilities is eye-watering.