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Chapter 1: What significant deal did Dublin City Council finalize regarding the DIT site?
The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk. But the move would also see the council vacate its long-standing base at Wood Quay.
And while it's being framed as a cost-effective alternative to a near 500 million retrofit of existing offices, it comes against a backdrop of serious questions around spending, governance and delivery, from stalled developments and problematic new bills to admissions that some past acquisitions should never have been purchased. Richard Shakespeare, good morning and welcome. Good morning, Pat.
Chapter 2: Why is Dublin City Council moving from its long-standing base at Wood Quay?
Thanks for having me in. Now, we talked a couple of weeks ago about the bunkers at Wood Quay and the history of them and how they were hard fought against by various people, including Father Martin, the late Father Martin, who fought long and hard and ended up being awarded for his trouble even as the bunkers were built.
Yeah, and I think... You know, I'm not here to apologise for the sins of the past, but in my previous life, I would have sort of seen it as, I suppose, an act of cultural vandalism, the largest Viking settlement outside of Scandinavia. But I suppose I am where I am. And, you know, just to frame it, you know, I didn't acquire the site for 581 million.
The site was acquired for 90 million plus VAT and fees, which is about 104 million. And I, you know, as a public servant, people like us to be creative, like us to be brave and like to be ambitious. And, you know, two of the big challenges, but the major challenge I have at the moment is housing.
The other one was, you know, the opportunity to spend quite a considerable amount of money retrofitting the civic offices.
Chapter 3: What challenges is Richard Shakespeare facing in his role as CEO?
Okay, now let's talk about it. It would have cost, the estimate, maybe 500 million. And I heard, by the way, when I was in RT a couple of weeks ago for the Late Late Show, they told me that the studio building, the cost of refurbing that would be 400 million. And therefore, I don't know what they're going to do. They're going to farm out the Late Late Show and other programs to private providers.
And those are solutions. But the whole thing is that you're always encouraging the rest of us to retrofit. to try and insulate our houses, to put solar panels on our roofs, to put heat pumps in. And you guys are just jumping ship.
You could say that. I think what it is, is that as the accounting officer for the city council, I've many things to look at. OK, so, yeah, environmental considerations are one, cost is another, regeneration is another and housing is another. So an opportunity presented itself.
about October of last year, where the Arup report that we had commissioned was crystallising and the costs were coming in, you know, at that 487 million if it was a single move. And that includes about, you might say, 152 million of...
Chapter 4: How does the new civic headquarters plan to address housing issues?
renting offices for 10 years, because that's the length of time it will take.
Are you saying that in order to refurb, you'd all have to get out? Yes.
There were two options. There was one in terms of we could have played Tetris with the staff and done it in bits and pieces, or we could go in one fell swoop. Now, we're also responsible for delivering services. So from that perspective, you know, trying to get a coherency in the services that we deliver, you know, a single move would be preferable.
Do I want to, you might say, move twice, move out, move back, move out, move back? No, I don't think it's a productive solution.
Okay, so you move out, you decide that it is not sustainable to actually do the refurb. You do a new build, which is probably energy efficient and so on up in Kevin Street and incorporated in all of that is accommodation.
There's 299 one and two bed units. I mean, I suppose the beauty of this particular site is that it's been completely de-risked from a planning perspective, from an engineering perspective, because it's above ground. And so there's probably been about a hundred odd million spent there.
in de-risking it, taking that on top of the 150 million between acquisition and planning costs, we're getting a fairly good deal, to be honest with you.
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Chapter 5: What is the expected timeline for the development on Kevin Street?
Okay, so the idea is that you will have a certain amount of housing there. Will that be privately bought? Will that be private housing? No. Is that how you're part financing it, or are these authority tenants?
No, I think it will probably be going down the line of the cost rental. And I know there's been commentary around cost rental recently. We have a model that we believe will work. And so that would be the intention, that they would be publicly owned homes. And we will go the cost rental model on it, which is, as you know, 25% below market.
What has happened to the bunkers at Wood Quay? I mean, the front building, the one along the river, is more modern than the original bunkers. And it was allegedly built in a very sustainable way at the time? At the time.
I think that's, you know, standards change.
Chapter 6: How does the cost rental model work in Dublin's housing strategy?
So is that going to be knocked down? Not necessarily. So what we are doing over the next couple of months is we'll be engaging with the elected members to get a direction of travel. We'll interrogate what they might want us to do. All we've done to date has been a massing study and it was kind of a very conservative massing study to see if you were putting housing on it, what could you fit?
And that was 532 plus a large community facility. So that might not necessarily be what the elected members want us to do. And I've had all sorts of suggestions in terms of we could actually celebrate the Viking heritage of the site on site.
But isn't much of that destroyed?
Absolutely. You know, an awful lot of it was taken away by the National Museum.
Well, they had no choice, had they? Because the vandalism was actually being perpetrated by the city council of the time.
I wouldn't call it, well, I called it cultural vandalism. No, I'm sure there's plenty of material that could be celebrated and shown.
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Chapter 7: What are the future plans for the bunkers at Wood Quay?
But that's, I mean, we are, as with any of these things, we will engage with the elected members to find out what direction of travel they would like to take on it.
Now, the mass concrete bunkers, and they are mass concrete. That's the way the build was at the time. Sam Stephenson, not the Scott Alan Walker, which is more glassy. The bunkers, what's to happen to those? Because all the embedded carbon in that concrete, what is to happen to it?
So the embodied carbon is, again, it all depends. Remember, the embodied carbon is carbon that's been spent in the manufacture of the concrete. And nothing is released if you knock them down, okay? It's the carbon that you would create going up. So the only carbon, if you were talking about there, is that the cost of transporting it outside. Well, that's to be determined.
Nobody has said we're going to clear file anything. That is part and parcel of it.
Surely before you go off shopping for another site and you bought the one in Kevin Street, which was admittedly a bargain basement price compared to what the previous people had bought it for.
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Chapter 8: How does Dublin City Council plan to improve traffic and public transport?
You got a bargain there. But surely the whole thing should have been comprehensively planned. In other words, knowing what was going in.
Before you leave. Well, I mean, it is, you might say, capable of being retrofitted for residential.
Let me get this straight. These concrete bunkers with very limited glazing on them, you'd put people into them?
Oh, you could do. I'm not saying you would, Pat. I'm saying you could. OK, that's that's literally. And you can you might say there was no point in reality. OK, I was under we were under time pressure. So there was no point in expending an awful lot of energy in overly interrogating what you might or might not do.
So in relation to saying at the moment, the plan is half baked.
No. What I'm saying to you is... But it's not begged. It's not fully begged. But I mean, that's the joy of living in a democracy, Pat, and I'm accountable to 63 elected members. And ultimately speaking, anything, doesn't matter whether it's a playground, Pat, or office buildings, or residential, it goes through a planning process with the elected members.
Now, I'm not going to waste time on the 10 million that has been allocated for kind of maintenance between now and when you might finally leave the building because you say it's money that might not be spent. Correct. I'm going to park that. Yeah. And you will be taken to task, I suppose, if it is spent.
You know, saying, what are you doing, wasting all this money on a building that you're now going to... It's really there in terms of a lot of the health and safety issues that you would need, you would have to address as an employee.
If a lift is banjaxed, you have to fix the lift. I understand all of that. So we will, you're asking us to hold our fire and judge you on the result. Yes. Okay.
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