Fianna Fáil TD Willie O’Dea has called on Taoiseach Simon Harris to “name and shame” those responsible for signing off on €336,000 of public funds for the cost of a bike shed built at Leinster House.
The extraordinary cost of the glorified bike stand has drawn the ire of the nation, including Taoiseach Simon Harris who described it as “inexcusable and inexplicable”.
Willie O’Dea said today he wants those who signed off on the project to face sanction.
The Limerick politician said that people working in the Civil Service, must be held accountable for their actions in the same way that politicians are expected to be.
I was absolutely stunned and sickened when I heard about it.
“The real question is, is anybody going to be held accountable for this? Politicians are expendable, but civil servants seem to be as safe as a scared cow in a Hindu heartland,” Mr O’Dea said.
“I was absolutely stunned and sickened when I heard about it and I’ll tell you why - I heard about it roughly about the same time I received an email from Irish Water that they couldn’t repair a manhole cover, due to the fact that they were having long internal discussions about it — I kid you not.”
“Who decided this had to be such an elaborate thing, built into the granite structure in Leinster House and all that - what is the point of it, why was it so elaborate?,” he asked.
“And, secondly, when the tenders came in - I presume they went for the lowest tender but I don’t know - was nobody in authority consulted about whether it was sensible to be spending this amount of taxpayers' money on this.”
Mr O’Dea said public expenditure on certain projects had “gone beyond a joke”.
He said he regularly meets constituents at his political clinics in Limerick who are “struggling to get to the end of the week on low wages, and then they see this, and they are scandalised by it, frankly”.
“My message to the Taoiseach, Simon Harris, is that he should now demonstrate that this government stands for accountability - and somebody, somewhere should be made accountable for this, because somebody, somewhere, took the decision.
“There’s no good talking about a Department or an office or something like that, there are actually human beings who took these decisions and they should be made accountable.”
Mr O’Dea said, however, that he was not hopeful of accountability over what many see as a waste of public funds.
“We don't have a good track record on that either; you know those reports into ‘system’s failures’ in the Department of Health - we’ll be told there was a system’s failure, it’s all meaningless jargon.”
'Immediate review'
An “immediate” review into the costs of the Dáil bike shed has been requested by Limerick Fine Gael TD and Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Public Works (OPW), Kieran O’Donnell.
Mr O’Dea said that, in his opinion, “announcing a review, when the money has been spent, is like closing the shed door after the horse has left, and the old horse has gone off to Spain and he is sunning himself by the poolside”.
Mr O’Dea said he wanted clarity on who would be involved in the review.
“There is a few questions I want answered, the first question is who is going to conduct the review into the cost of this thing? Are the Ciivil Service going to be reviewing themselves?”
“There is a principle of constitutional justice known as nemo iudex in causa sua, meaning that nobody should be a judge in their own court. Government departments have a great habit of investigating themselves, which is completely unacceptable,” Mr O’Dea said.
“More importantly, when is this review going to be published - is it going to be published before the general election or sometime in the dim and distant future after the election is over when people’s minds are on other things?”
