FINE Gael councillor Adam Teskey was left feeling shortchanged after Limerick Council deemed works, expected to cost up to €3million, necessary to repurpose the former Bank of Ireland (BOI) building in Rathkeale.
At January’s Adare/Rathkeale Municipal District meeting, councillors learned that it will take up to two years before the Lower Main Street site sees “proper action” as funding needs to be procured.
Cllr Teskey couldn’t understand how millions in taxpayer money was now required to see the building back in use, considering it was in operation up until the day the BOI closed its doors for the last time in 2021. A total of 88 branches shut their doors at that time – a third of BOI’s branches.
“It’s quite ironic I think that three or four years ago when it was put into our ownership, and prior to that, it was an operational bank. It wasn’t a closed bank, it was an operational bank the day it was put on the market,” Cllr Teskey told Council members.
The Fine Gael man went on to say that he visited the building with an auctioneer after it went on the market and took the view that “it wasn’t in a bad state”.
“There were more cosmetic issues rather than structural or capital structural issues,” he said.
“Yet here we are four years on talking about spending two and a half to three million on it. That seems to me to be quite a lavish amount of money to spend on a building. Can we justify that to the taxpayer and the local ratepayer of this area?”
Cllr Teskey said that it is “bizarre to me that in an organisation of 1,500 that we cannot get inside consultants to design and repurpose a commercial entity that’s only been out of service for four years, which is going to cost in the region of three million. There’s a headline in that alone and a prime example of the bureaucracy and red tape that exists in this country,” Teskey hit out.
Director of Adare-Rathkeale Municipal District, Vincent Murray, explained that the building is currently fitted out as a bank and the local authority is going through a process to determine its best future use. The upper floors, he told Council members, are not very stable, with water damage to the back of the building.
Cllr Stephen Keary (FG) didn’t think the figure given of two to three million for the “significant” works required on the building was excessive.
“There has to be universal access, disability access, fire cert, and all the rest, and then the subdivision of it. You don’t feel a couple of million being gobbled up at today’s costs. So spending two million wouldn’t put me off,” he suggested.