Here we go again - back to square one in the procurement of anational conference centre, writes Frank McDonald.
Yesterday's announcement by the Minister for Tourism and Sport, Mr O'Donoghue, is merely the latest instalment of a monumental planning fiasco.
It is now nearly 15 years since the idea of building a national conference centre (NCC) was first mooted and nearly 10 years since it was identified as a "flagship project" in the EU-funded Tourism Operational Programme 1994-1999. Yet not an ounce of concrete has been poured.
No major scheme in the Republic, apart from the Burren visitor centre, has been so bedevilled by delay, uncertainty and bad blood as the NCC project. Indeed, the failure to deliver it has become all the more embarrassing since the completion of Belfast's Waterfront Hall in 1997.
The root cause of this fiasco is that successive governments expected to procure it at no cost to the public purse, either in terms of capital investment or running costs; they wanted something for nothing and appeared to believe that it could be produced by waving a magic wand.
Although every government since the late-1980s had said it wanted a conference centre, none of them was prepared to pay for it - despite reasonable estimates by Dublin Chamber of Commerce, among others, that it would generate up to €50 million in tourism revenue.
Indeed, one thesis was the inherently loss-making conference centre would need a casino to provide a "financial engine" to support it, which encouraged the US Ogden leisure group to pursue its hugely controversial Sonas Centre plan for the Phoenix Park racecourse site.
In the teeth of ferocious local opposition, Ogden secured An Bord Pleanála planning permission in 1996, only to have its €300 million project scuppered when the then Rainbow Coalition government, and subsequently Fianna Fail, pledged not to license a casino.
The latest competition for prospective developers - this time with the guarantee of a State lease - is the fourth or fifth procurement process since the first abortive competition in 1995, when Mr Enda Kenny TD - now the leader of Fine Gael - was minister for trade and tourism.
Just before the final fence was reached, the competition was aborted and Mr Kenny announced that his department and Bord Fáilte would be entering into exclusive negotiations with the Royal Dublin Society to develop the centre on the site of its Ballsbridge showgrounds.
Mr Kenny's unilateral decision - taken, he maintains, with the acquiescence of the EU Commission - ignored the fact that Dublin Corporation had already granted full permission for a rival conference centre scheme on the Carlton Cinema site in Upper O'Connell Street.
One of the considerations was that the RDS, as a quasi-public institution, might qualify for a higher level of EU aid under the Tourism Operational Programme - an assumption that turned out to be false. And traffic-choked Ballsbridge needed a conference centre like a hole in the head.
After the Carlton Group challenged Mr Kenny's favouritism towards the RDS in Brussels, the Ballsbridge option collapsed. This led to a second competition for developers, which the RDS itself entered, and then a "negotiated procedure" that resulted in Treasury Holdings coming out on top.
Treasury had done a deal with CIE for its 52-acre site stretching back from Spencer Dock on the North Wall. The developers had also commissioned Kevin Roche, the internationally-renowned Irish-born architect, to design a 2,000-seat NCC to Bord Fáilte's brief.
But whatever the merits of Mr Roche's scheme, the problem was that Treasury claimed it needed no less than six million square feet (55,740 sq metres) of commercial, retail, office and residential space on the pivotally-located Spencer Dock site to "make the sums stack up". A huge planning battle followed, pitting Treasury against the Docklands Development Authority, An Taisce, the local community and even the billionaire financier Dermot Desmond. The outcome was a decision by An Bord Pleanála to approve the NCC, but not the rest of the scheme.
There the matter has rested, until yesterday. But don't bank on bricks and mortar emerging, because the whole sorry saga underlines not only woolly thinking at the highest levels, but also our apparent inability to deliver even basic pieces of essential infrastructure.