Government pays €8.5m for city parking

More than €8.5 million is spent each year by the Government in rent for almost 4,000 car parking spaces for civil servants working in Dublin.

The cost of the 3,954 spaces ranges from the most expensive at €3,182 a space on Merrion Square to the cheapest at €317 per space for parking for eight cars at Amiens Street.

The annual bill for renting the seven spaces at Merrion Square is €25,461 per year, while the lease cost of the Amiens Street site is just €2,539 a year for the eight spaces.

Across Dublin, the average cost paid by the Government for civil service parking is €1,928 per annum.

A spokesman for the Office of Public Works - which provided the details - said the vast majority of parking rented by the State did not generate any income because civil servants are not charged for using it.

The civil service has access to a further 3,299 parking spaces on State-owned properties which include many Garda stations in the capital, the Four Courts and at Phoenix Park.

While most of the parking spaces are attached to buildings already leased by the State, 762 additional stand-alone spaces are leased. The cost of renting this additional parking is €2.4 million per year.

The cost of the 3,192 parking spaces available to the Government as part of a leased building is €6.1 million.

Under tax rules, benefit-in-kind is not charged on car parking spaces provided by an employer as they are not "treated as giving rise to a taxable benefit," according to a spokesman for the Revenue.

The OPW said the number of parking spaces provided for civil servants had declined marginally in recent years and was expected to fall still further as civil servants were decentralised.

The majority of rented Government car parking is in the Dublin 1 and 2 postal areas with 2,355 spaces leased in these districts.

These are also among the most expensive with an overall annual cost of €5.85 million or an average of €2,483 per space per annum.

This is more than double the €1,032 per annum cost of providing the 1,599 car parking spaces outside the Dublin 1 and 2 areas, the provision of which has an annual cost of €1.65 million.

Also among the most expensive parking spaces are 10 spots for Department of Finance staff at Mount St Lower which cost €31,751 per annum, or just over €3,175 per space.

Based on these figures the State is getting a good deal, according to Liam Keilthy of Parking Consultants Limited, based in Dublin.

"If you wanted a year's lease for a parking space in Stephen's Green, if you could find one, it would cost between €3,500 and €4,500 annually before VAT. In Ballsbridge, parking spaces cost around €3,000 so that's your benchmark.

"That would suggest the State is getting a good deal. The average price they are paying is about half what it should be and that could be because of long leases and that they are buying so many."

Mr Keilthy said there were in total about 65,000 parking spaces in Dublin, including all on-street parking and those spaces leased by the Government.

"There are some interesting things happening in parking in the city. Dublin city council owns three car parks and its pricing structure discourages long stay parking. The first four to five hours are okay but the price for parking longer than that increases significantly," he said.