Talk about wasting money....
Deer Park, Dublin.
Modernization and accessibility upgrades.
Sounds like a simple task for the local council. Tear out the old unsuitable steps and redo to modern health and safety standards.
Obviously this will take a little bit of planning, some permits, materials then labour / machinery.
If you were getting this done for your business what would it cost???
I was saying that I could find a person for about $30k - $50k to do a very good job.
What would you think
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Total price of the job..........$750K!!!!!
Crazy stuff and typical government waste. Now I don't know how or why this was approved but it would be very strange if somebody wasn't getting a brown envelope somewhere along the chain.
Otherwise you couldn't explain this being signed off on.
When things don't make sense, follow the money. It always shows the truth. Somebody made a huge profit on this so questions should be asked.
I asked grok what the costings for this job should be.
Even at the upper end, this is ~80% less than billed, highlighting procurement inefficiencies in Irish public projects. For context, similar UK/Irish park upgrades (e.g., ramped entrances) rarely top €100k unless major excavation is involved.
People don't care when it's not their money.
Whatever about the waste on Hive but these people are highly paid professionals with a job to do so it's hard to believe how they can treat Irish tax money with such contempt but greed is a terrible thing.
There are so many faults in this from the people charging these prices to the way we process these jobs and the group in charge of signing off on it.
It just goes to show how important accountability and checks are when dealing with money as without them people will take advantage.
There is a big lesson to be learned form this for our own community and putting in place a better process for handling money and transparency.
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Well, fuck me sideways! Excuse the language now, but that's a fucking disgrace. €750K. Absolutely outrageous. When the multinational tax revenues eventually go (and lots of it will eventually), this country will be rightly goosed.
I thought the bike shed was bad... this is up there with it..
It drives me crazy that working people lose half their money to income tax, lose anything we can earn form saving, investing, inheritance and then you see waste like this.
If they cut out all of the waste we see form the government we could get rid of half the taxes in the country and just pay a flat income tax.
We would still end up in the same place but with the whole working class better off.
When I was in the legal business we handled a lot of government contracts. We charged our normal rate, but everyone else I knew—everyone—billed state bodies at least double. Hardly surprising really since no questions were ever asked, and in any case it was damn near impossible to get the buggers to pay.
I'm not one bit surprised.
We take a few government contracts for construction and give a fair price but i know a lot more that add in extras where ever they can.
It's not right but they get away with it especially in this economy where the government is flush with cash and just want results.
IT will be different when we hit a recession again and every penny counts but they don't think like that.
It's amazing some of the things they do. They just spent fifty million dollars to lower the grade around the public museum that sits on the river here so that "students" from the Museum school, which is actually in the old Museum building not the newer one on the river bank, could have contact with the river, and to make it so people can do likewise. Meanwhile, back in 2013 during some historical flooding here, city employees pushed mounds of sand they accumulated in piles that came up into the park during the flooding into a creek bed that feeds into a system of natural lagoons fed by spring and river water, and over the years has slowly choked off the flow of the stream leaving sand unable to be washed back out into the river that comes up in yearly flooding, just not to the extent it did during the historical flood. One lagoon is gone basically and a center one is showing signs of filling. What a natural disaster so to speak, and that would have been a real treasure for school students to learn how eco systems operate and could have actually safely have done it whereas a river, no school is going to take on the liability of having student wondering around in a river. Which we all know why they really spent that money on that, but that's a whole different story, but that fifty million would have been more than enough to have cleaned that stream and lagoon back out.
That's crazy stuff right there.
They just don't think ahead or care how these things work.
It's all about quick results and quick fixes whatever the cost.
The other part of the story is the level of deceit for really doing it. They'd never spent that kind of money for any "school group to contact with the water", it might have been five million but still that's a lot of money and the real reason is they spent years trying to convince regulatory agencies to remove the dams in our city so they could generate millions off people coming here to ride the rapids. After years of trying they were told they could remove two small dams that don't amount to much but a couple bumps but the big dam they got denied so now they want to make it so people can go tubing down the river, with high banks and most of the city having high cement walls running through it, they are trying to adjust the bank levels in anticipation of making money off people who'll come here to go tubing. Which isn't much fun if you are just floating between cement walls and high banks, plus I guess you could consider it "off ramp" accessibility for people who want to stop along the way or emergency access for first responders, but the level of deceit and lying is unbelievable.
This happens all around the world... I remember the days when politicians (or those in charge) would make deals and take a (personal, bribing) cut of 5-10%... Nowadays, those who are DOING the job receive something like that (10%), and the cut of crooked politicians is 90%!!!
Your example shows exactly that! It was 10x more than it should!
In the end, it is OUR money... We are all paying it through dozens of different taxes... Same as on HIVE...
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Government project always comes with excesses. Not only in Ireland but mostly everywhere. My concerns most is always ending up doing a good job
Geez! The profits from this is enormous without even guessing those on the payroll who do nothing and still get paid. The inefficiency of government bodies is a surprise that they're still surviving. A business would've filed for bankruptcy a long while ago. Too much unnecessary spending.