Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

A decent sized crowd stormed the foyer of City Hall Monday, as part of a public protest calling on Galway City Council to ‘Save the Pálás’, the jinxed arthouse cinema at Merchant’s Road.

We can only assume the protestors, well-intentioned though they are, are unaware of or have forgotten the history of the ill-fated arthouse cinema project.

Now might be a good time to remind them – before they succeed in persuading anyone in power to pump more public money into what was always destined to be a white elephant.

This column has consistently highlighted the sometimes-unpopular opinion that Galway did not need an arthouse cinema, and that there were far more pressing cultural projects that should have taken precedence.

From the outset, an arthouse cinema was a vanity project. It was beset by unavoidable problems, but it was mismanaged too.

And that mismanagement cost the taxpayers in excess of €3m more than was budgeted for, on a project that was nearly nine years late.

This latest controversy came before Christmas when The Light House Cinema Group – which had leased the building from Galway City Council for peppercorn rent – announced it would be closing the Pálás in February.

The Light House Group invested €1.5 million in the cinema when it took it over, but since then, it incurred operating losses of over €1.8 million. It said it was incurring losses of roughly €250,000 per annum to keep the doors open – despite showing mainstream movies, available in commercial cinemas, as well as the arthouse films for which it was intended.

The Light House has a successful cinema in Dublin. The group is an expert in running arthouse and cultural cinema spaces.

That it failed in the 2020 City of Culture suggests there was no appetite for an arthouse cinema in Galway, although if the Pálás had attracted crowds like the one that gathered on Monday in City Hall,  then maybe it would’ve been a success.

Or maybe there was an appetite for an arthouse cinema, but Merchants Road was the wrong location, or the building wasn’t large enough to make it viable.

That was flagged in advance, but the powers-that-be ignored concerns – they ploughed on with their cultural ‘vision’, without possessing the expertise to deliver the project.

This isn’t just the opinion of a newspaper columnist and the usual cranks.

The Department of Culture, Heritage and Gaeltacht concluded this in its ‘Post Project Review of the Pálás Cinema Project’.

The 2019 report said: “The main problem with the project was the fact that the original project promoters (Solas-Galway Picture Palace Teoranta), while very well-intentioned and passionate about cinema, were not sufficiently skilled to manage a project as complex as Pálás.”

It said Solas “had no demonstrable experience of operating a cinema or managing a large construction project”.

The Department said it “should have taken that lack of experience into account when awarding the grant (of funding) and perhaps insisted at an earlier stage that Solas partner with a professional cinema operator and that an experienced project manager be brought on board”.

Solas received over €7 million from public sector bodies, together with the site for the cinema, which was purchased for €1.9 million by the City Council in 2007. The project was around €3m over budget and was delivered nearly nine years late.

The Charities Regulator also issued a damning verdict – it criticised accounting practices, oversight, corporate governance and the lack of skills and competence of Solas to manage such a big project; concerns echoed by the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) and Public Accounts Committee.

City Hall needs to ignore populist protests and sentimentality as it decides what to do with a building that should never have been publicly funded in the first place.

Pictured: City Council Chief Executive, Leonard Cleary, pictured here in suit and tie, trying to get through the foyer of City Hall on Monday during the public protest about the Pálás.