THE BUILDING that has been home to the Irish Cultural Centre in London since the mid-1990s will be sold off, the Conservative-controlled council made clear last night.
However it left open the possibility that it may give the voluntary organisation, which is backed by Irish Government funds, enough time to raise the £2 million (€2.3 million) needed to buy it.
Delivering an impassioned plea to Hammersmith and Fulham Council, chairman of the cultural centre Jim O’Hara said the council had offered a five-year extension to the centre’s lease in talks last year, going so far as to send lease documents to the organisation, only to “renege” on the offer in June last year when it said it wanted to sell the building.
“I was brought up with an old saying that a man’s word is his bond and I believe that the councillors would not see that as an out-moded concept,” said Mr O’Hara, who was loudly applauded by supporters in the council chamber’s public gallery and by Labour councillors. However, Tory councillors did not applaud.
A member of the council’s cabinet in charge of community care, Conservative cllr Joe Carlebach, said the council had had to make staff redundant and merge services to cope with its debt, which is costing more than £400,000 a month in interest.
He believed the Irish community in the borough had “the wherewithal” to buy it.
Quoting James Joyce in his speech, Mr Carlebach said supporters of the centre should view “this challenge as an historic opportunity to determine its own future” and create an independence that will last for many years.
Urging councillors to extend the lease as “a first option”, Mr O’Hara appealed to councillors that if they insisted on going ahead with a sale that they should give the centre three years to raise the money needed.
He said if the money could be raised more quickly, the centre would not delay in finalising an agreement with the local authority, which is trying to reduce its £133 million debt.
“If you are determined to go ahead and sell the centre at least give us an extension to the lease, so that we may have the time to raise the funds. If you do that, we both win. The council gets the funds that it says that it needs, we raise the funds, buy the building and continue the educational, welfare and welfare activities that we are involved in. I am appealing to you in this to be reasonable, to be fair and, above all, to use an old-fashioned word, to be honourable,” said Mr O’Hara.
The cultural centre was established in 1995 and was funded directly by the council until 2007, when its £175,000 subsidy was stopped after the Conservatives took over control of the council.
Pointing to the centre’s “national and international reputation”, Mr O’Hara said it would be disastrous if the only centre devoted to Irish culture in Britain was forced to close at a time when relations between Britain and Ireland “have never been better” and during a year when Queen Elizabeth would probably visit Ireland as a guest of the Irish State.
