Cork City Council Press Release:

The Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr. Mary Shields today (Friday, August 15) welcomed the commencement of the second phase of the tender process for the Cork Events Centre.

 Cllr. Shields expects a very positive response from interested parties and believes that a preferred tenderer can be secured before the end of the year, with work commencing on the events centre in early 2015.

 “The city’s bid to secure a preferred tenderer has now moved from a competitive dialogue to a competitive negotiation tendering procedure and notice of that was posted on the Official Journal of the European Union yesterday (Thursday, August 14). We continue to have a robust process in place to deal with this part of the procedure and having assessed where we are we believe we can achieve a positive result by engaging in the negotiated tender phase.

“The Cork Events Centre is a crucially important project for the city of Cork and the greater Cork area in terms of jobs, tourism, concerts, exhibitions and conferences. Given the growing improvement in the economy I believe the second phase will attract greater interest and competition from operators and promoters,” said Cllr. Shields.

 An outline of the negotiated process is:

·         Suitability  assessment questionnaire

·         Selection of suitable entities

·         Submission of initial tender

·         Commencement of negotiations

·         Assessment of tenders and selection of preferred tenderer.

 The preferred tenderer will be announced in November/December 2014.

Interested parties will tender for available public funding totaling €14 million, which has been committed by the Government (€10m) and Cork City Council (€4m).  Any further public funding will be on a repayable basis.