A Georgian building perched on 25 acres of land overlooking Galway Bay, which cost the former GMIT €4m to acquire during the Celtic Tiger boom, remains idle – 20 years after it was purchased.

Once home to the Blakes, one of the original tribes of Galway — and owned by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s — Murrough House and lands, near Renmore, have not been developed and remain mostly unused, despite incurring thousands of Euro annually for maintenance and caretaking costs.

Atlantic Technological University (ATU, formerly GMIT) has insisted it plans to implement a masterplan soon but, after two decades of inaction, staff at the Dublin Road institute have described it as a ‘white elephant’.

Details of the annual costs associated with maintenance of the property – released to Galway City Tribune under Freedom of Information – reveal that ATU spent about €4,000 on average for monthly upkeep during the first six months of this year.

The €23,500 outlay on maintenance and repairs on building, which dates to 1860, between January and June of 2024, does not include caretaking costs.

The university redacted the costs of caretaking to conceal the exact remuneration paid to a caretaker employed by ATU, which its FOI officer deemed was personal information.

This newspaper previously revealed the institute was incurring annual costs of about €42,000 to maintain the pile at a time when GMIT was under financial pressure.

This included maintenance and upkeep costs of €44,000 in 2014, €39,000 in 2015 and €23,000 for the first six months of 2016.

The latest figures obtained under FOI show ATU spent €10,316 on maintenance in 2022, plus €6,600 in 2023, and €23,600 in the first six months of this year. All totals exclude caretaker salary costs.

The outlay over that two-and-a-half-year period, minus caretaking costs, was just over €40,000.

It included: €16,569 for building maintenance electrical works this year; about €4,000 on electricity; more than €13,000 on oil; €1,362 on grounds maintenance; almost €2,000 on equipment maintenance; €2,066 on general repairs and maintenance on the building; around €700 on waste disposal; and €42.32 on an annual security contract.

Pictured: The 19th century Murrough House: purchased 20 years ago.