Delays and costs mount for council’s Merrion Square tea rooms

Nobody appeared to be on the construction site in the northern side of Merrion Square on Monday afternoon.

Colourful signage on the grey wooden hoardings around the perimeter told passers-by that this was eventually to be a tea room and an open-air art gallery.

All of this was “business as usual”, one sign said. But there weren’t many signs that the business was moving along.

The temporary gates leading into the gravelly site were under lock and chain – as they had been just before noon the following day.

The tea room was due to be completed this autumn, Green Party Councillor Claire Byrne was told at Dublin City Council’s South East Area Committee meeting last December.

But works have some way to go. On Tuesday, it is still a windowless block, missing any terrace and with the external brickwork still exposed.

The finish date has been pushed back (again). Now, the council expects that the works will be substantially completed by the second quarter of next year, a council spokesperson said on Monday.

Another delay is majorly disappointing, said Byrne, the Green Party councillor on Tuesday. “It’s gone way beyond the original timelines. It was supposed to be built in a matter of months.”

A spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that due to “contractually confidential matters”, they were not in a position to provide information about the reasons for the delays, or the current projected cost of the project.

A warm cup of TBA

The council originally approved an application by its Parks and Landscapes Services Division to deliver the tea room with a public toilet back in November 2017.

In the council capital programme for 2022 to 2024, construction on the building was set to begin in 2022. The cost was projected at around €3.4 million.

But the start date was later changed to June 2023, with work expected to take 12 months.

An advertisement to lease the property, posted to the Colliers real estate site in October 2024, said it was anticipated to be open by “early 2025”.

When Byrne, the Green Party councillor, got her update in December 2024 giving a timeline of finishing this autumn, the price tag had gone up again. 

At that stage, the council said it expected to spend €4.9 million on the building, according to its capital programme for 2025 to 2027.

That an entire section of the park has been closed off for so long – with the council now pointing to the second quarter of 2026 – is frustrating, says Byrne, the Green Party councillor.

“They just seem to be missing their deadlines all the time, and for no apparent reasons. It’s disappointing on a load of levels,” she says.

Waiting on the toilets

This isn’t just about waiting on the council to deliver a new tea room, Byrne says. “With the tea room come public toilets, and we’re in a time where there’s just been so many discussions around the lack of provision of these basic sanitary services in the city.”

Sean Moore Park in Ringsend still doesn’t have the long promised cafe and toilet, she says. “We’ve been getting the same response for three years. Technical challenges.”

After the council first put out a tender for a contractor at Sean Moore Park, as well as similar facilities across the city in May 2021, the original contractor backed out, because they deemed the cost of installing utilities at the coastal park as unviable.

In July 2023, those works were projected to be done by the second quarter of 2024.

But when Byrne sought an update at the South East Area Committee meeting on 8 September, she received no reply.

The council ought to look to its neighbouring councils, Byrne said on Tuesday. “Can we not just put in a compost toilet like Fingal did along the coast? There are solutions.”

Fingal County Council contracts Healthmatic, a private company, to manage public eco-toilets in Howth.

These eco-toilets are waterless, and use worms or air and evaporation to break down matter, according to Healthmatic’s website.

Dublin City Council also doesn't have a clear timeline for when the tea room and public toilet up in Palmerston Park will be open.

Councillors agreed to grant a 10-year lease for the tea room to Coffee Crowd Limited back at its monthly meeting on 7 July.

But, a spokesperson for the council said on Monday that they didn’t have a definitive date as to when it would be open “until the legal process relating to the lease is concluded”.