The Office of Public Works has come under fire after spending nearly half-a-million euro on a new wall for a state agency.

A replacement wall for the Dublin headquarters of the Workplace Relations Commission cost €490,000, leading to the OPW to be nicknamed ‘the office of posh walls’.

On Newstalk Breakfast, presenter Ciara Kelly asked, “why does no one cry stop?”

“This isn’t the first of these issues,” she said.

‘The money is going down the absolute drain...’

The OPW is coming under fire after spending nearly half-a-million euro on a new wall@NTBreakfast pic.twitter.com/EYtMXsxxWE

— NewstalkFM (@NewstalkFM) January 29, 2025

“The OPW, remember, was also responsible for the bike shed that was €345,000, or whatever it was.

"That wasn’t really a bike shed, it was just a bit of glass on a few poles and held 20 bikes and barely kept the rain off.

“At what point do they kind of go, ‘We’re spending money here like it’s snuff at a wake?’”

A cyclist uses the bike shed at Leinster House. Image: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Fellow presenter Shane Coleman also mentioned a security shelter that cost €1.4 million.

“Everything seems to be gold-plated here,” he said.

“It costs a ridiculous amount of money to do small amounts of work like building a wall or a bike shed or a security hut.

“I think that is crazy – and clearly what’s going on here is, you know, it’s not their money, so they don’t need to be careful about it.”

A new security hut at the back entrance of Leinster House in Dublin cost €1.429 million, according to the Office of Public Works (OPW). Photo shows: the security hut. Photograph: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie. 25/09/2024

Public procurement expert at DCU Paul Davis said that this overspend is a result of poor surveying.

“If you look at their breakdown of material, it looks like they were very clear about what they were going to do – but evidently they didn’t survey correctly," he said.

“Halfway through they discovered that they actually had a live electricity line.

“You would have assumed that somebody who was looking at a demolition and construction would have seen that beforehand and therefore built that into the tender cost.

“They didn’t and so they got caught - and getting caught means then after the fact of what the original tender was, they had to go out and actually get additional works done and that’s where the additional spend came from."

However, Mr Davis said that the original cost was acceptable as the OPW were “reconstructing a heritage piece of work”.

Main image: Split image showing Ciara Kelly in the Newstalk studio (L) and the new wall outside the Workplace Relations Commission (R).