Current Government Buildings
In the mid-1980s, increasingly unhappy at the cramped office space, Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald decided to convert the entire building for government use. This policy was implemented by his successor, Charles Haughey, who had the state sell a block of Georgian houses across the road, which up to then had been in state ownership, for £17 million to fund the rebuild. A new engineering faculty was also built on University College Dublin's Belfield campus at tens of millions of pounds.
Much of the original interior of the original building was gutted to facilitate the creation of a state-of-the-art new government office. Haughey finally moved into the new building in 1991. Critics of the expenditure, at a time when Ireland was in financial difficulties, nicknamed the building the Chaz Mahal. However criticism of the redesigned building soon died away and it won major architectural awards for its design, with world leaders like British Prime Minister John Major praising it to then Taoiseach Albert Reynolds when he visited the building to meet him. The entrance hall is dominated light streaming through Evie Hone's critically acclaimed stained glass window, My Four Green Fields.
The new building included a state-of-the-art suite of offices for the Taoiseach and his staff, a set of visually striking committee rooms, new offices, canteen facilities, a helicopter pad and a new press briefing room. Originally the Office of Public Works had planned a new cabinet suite of rooms also. However the Government opted to continue to use the Council Chamber which had been the cabinet room for all Irish governments since 1922.
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