New school building program expensive

Well said firefly and I would agree with you.. 11million to build a school in current climate is ridiculous. I'm thinking 4-5m per school would be major school facility. I recall when they built cork airport, michael o'leary of ryanair said he was involved in building two airport terminals in germany for combined total of 27m. (one 15m, one 12m) yet cork airport cost 200m...total waste of money. So seems to be that their still is no control on spending. These schools should be properly specified and tendered and I bet costs would be much lower if controlled.
 
€11m per school inclu. all fees & building costs etc. is not expensive. I've been involved in school projects before. The new schools being proposed will be modern facilitys properly fitted out. ( based on what I had worked on before)
If they slashed the costs of the schools, we'd end up with schools that were below par and then everyone would be complaining that the Government are half doing things and parents/teachers would be out banging the aul " the govt doesnt invest enough in our children" drum etc.
Facilitys like these are long term investments that I have no problem with. Regarding tendering etc. Projects like these were always difficult to win for contractors, and in the current construction climate, the prospect of long term work from these projects will drive the contractors tender price to the minimum.
Its a case of damned if they do & damned if they dont for the govt these days though.
 
1. 11m per school IS expensive.

2. The reported article didn't actually say that there is €579 milliion being spent on 52 schools. It was reported that 52 schools were being built as PART of the €579 million programme.

3. School buildings are not a long term investment. Demographics change; there are schools built 30 years ago that have lots of empty places. There are schools built in the past ten years that are already too small for their catchment. I have often thought that a good long term strategy with schools would be to design them into mixed used buildings, rather than sticking them into separate campus-type settings. But this might drive our pre-fab makers out of business. I doubt we will ever get it right.
 
Anything an Irish government pays to be built will be overpaid for. Tenders mean nothing, every project never seems to pay the project price. Prices in contracts seem to mean nothing. It's seems the Irish civil service can not negotiate a price for a building where the cost is 11M but the price ultimately paid is many multiples of that. Builders must be rubbing their hands in glee at the latest scheme. How many of the builders will be disgraced NAMA'd builders.

What does the 11M equal in price per sq foot or metre? That's the only way one can decide if 11M is a lot or not.
 
Bronte said:
Anything an Irish government pays to be built will be overpaid for. Tenders mean nothing, every project never seems to pay the project price. Prices in contracts seem to mean nothing. It's seems the Irish civil service can not negotiate a price for a building where the cost is 11M but the price ultimately paid is many multiples of that.
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I presume you have a long list of examples to hand of similar projects in recent years that ran over budget?
 
MOB said:
...
2. The reported article didn't actually say that there is €579 milliion being spent on 52 schools. It was reported that 52 schools were being built as PART of the €579 million programme. ...
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It didn't say that either. As part of the Government's €579 million school building programme, the Minister said :

  • "The 52 projects I am moving to tender and construction ..."
  • "... will create more than 23,500 places in 20 new schools and 32 extended and refurbished schools ..."
There is then more Government / Civil Service / PR waffle about the phases various projects are at or will move to :

  • 25 will move to tender and construction "shortly"
  • "a further" 27 are authorised to prepare tender documentation
  • 22 will appoint design teams this year
  • "a further" 29 will start the design process and appoint design teams this year.
You will notice that that is more than 52 so as usual some "projects" appear under more than one heading. Not that any of these are actually new "projects"; they've been hanging around for quite a while and are just at new phases.

This is all just the usual FF / CS obfuscation and PR rubbish with lots of numbers being flung about but no solid information about what will happen or precisely when - if they committed to that some smart person might actually be able to measure performance and the cost per "project" or school place.

Source - [broken link removed]
 
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