Office of Public Works Priorities and Progress: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-19 ============================================================ Sarah O'Reilly (AON), Agricultural Panel The Minister of State is welcome. I recognise the good work he and the OPW are doing but the public is fed up hearing about waste in the OPW. I hope that is something the Minister of State will focus on. Every few months there seems to be another headline, another figure and another project that has gone badly wrong: €20 million spent on leasing buildings that are lying empty; €300,000 on a bike shed in Leinster House; the security hut; and over €4.2 million spent on a children's science centre that was never built. Ordinary workers who pay tax every week look at that and ask how it keeps happening and why so little is thought of their hard-earned money. The problem is when projects go over budget, our oversight completely fails. Nobody ever seems to be accountable. There is no one person or team that is clearly accountable. If nobody is responsible, then nothing changes, there are no consequences and there are no learnings from mistakes. I want to know what the Minister of State will do about that. We have previously proposed a junior Minister to be tasked with responsibility for overseeing State projects to monitor spending. Is there a project monitor assigned for large capital products in the OPW? One of the main priorities for the Minister of State should be tracking and oversight of the public spend. Transaction numbers already exist on payments. The question is why they are not being linked back to the original tender and contract award notices so projects can be tracked properly from start to finish. Will the OPW move to link those transaction numbers to individual projects? That would allow Members of this House and the public to clearly see how much money is spent on a project, whether it came in under budget or over budget, and whether overruns occurred. We often see broad headings such as "€100 million on construction costs" but that tells us very little. We do not know how much went to each project and whether we got value for money. We need to drill down into those figures. The Government and the Minister of State cannot allow public money to be spent with little oversight and no responsibility when something goes wrong. I have three questions about things in my local area. The Bailieborough Garda station was announced in 2015. It was supposed to be opened early this year, according to the response the last time I had a Commencement debate. It is still not open. Does the Minister of State have a date for its opening? I would like to find information on the rivers in Cavan and Monaghan under the responsibility of the OPW. What rivers are they? What are the OPW's plans for the closed Garda station in Stradone? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:57+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-19