A Dublin tourist attraction is suing Fáilte Ireland for its 'irrational' refusal of funding
The developers of ‘the Vaults’ experience claim an anti-Dublin bias in grant aid.
THE DEVELOPER OF a tourism project in Dublin’s south inner city has brought a High Court challenge over Fáilte Ireland’s refusal to include it on a grant scheme.
The action has been brought by Frontier Entertainment, which has developed a tourist experience called ‘the Vaults ‘at the Old School House building in St John’s Lane, Thomas Street in Dublin’s western inner city.
The company applied to Fáilte Ireland to have the project included in the ‘grant scheme for large tourism projects 2016-2020′.
The Vaults proposal involves an interactive actor-led experience using theatrical sets through a series of ‘dramatic and entertaining scenes’ from 800 years of Irish history.
However Frontier Entertainment was informed last March that its application had been refused. This was because the Vault’s proposal did not obtain a passing score of 55 points out of a total of 60. The Vaults obtained 52 points.
Frontier Entertainment claims the refusal is flawed and in High Court proceedings against Fáilte Ireland seeks to have the refusal quashed.
Frontier said the decision should be quashed on grounds including that the decision breached its legitimate expectations, breaches fair procedures, is irrational and that irrelevant considerations were taken into account.
It also seeks a declaration that Frontier Entertainment is entitled to have its application for grand aid to be reconsidered.
‘Anti-Dublin bias’
Counsel told the High Court that one of the reasons the challenge has been brought is because when assessing the scores of the various applicants Fáilte Ireland had applied a bias/negative weighting for projects situated in Dublin.
This was done by calculating a project’s average annual revenue for a period of 10 years and expressing that revenue as a proportion of the tourist revenue of the locality where the project was located.
This meant Dublin-based applicants were severely disadvantaged as their 10-year revenue would only represent a small proportion of the overall tourist revenue for Dublin city, counsel said.
Nowhere in the grant scheme’s application guidelines does it state that projects located outside of Dublin in weaker tourist locations would be favoured over Dublin-based projects.
The decision to apply a bias/negative weighting in respect of Dublin based projects was taken after the deadline had passed and was not communicated in advance to applicants, counsel said.
Permission to bring the challenge was granted, on an ex-parte basis, by Justice Seamus Noonan. The judge made the matter returnable to a date in July.
