The Irish Times

At the latest reported figure of £431 million (€625 million), the new Scottish Parliament is costing tight-fisted Scots almost as much as we're paying for the Luas or the Dublin Port Tunnel. And most of them still see it as a spectacular waste of public money, on a par with London's Millennium Dome. How could the building have cost so much? The original estimate in 1998, when Catalan architect Enric Miralles was chosen to design it, was put at £50 million. Though it was never likely that his complex concept could be realised for that price, nobody expected costs to get completely out of control. What complicated the situation, and jinxed the project, was that it its begetters and prime advocates died within months of each other in 2000 - Miralles from a brain tumour in July and Donald Dewar, then Scotland's first minister, from a brain haemorrhage in October after a fall at his Edinburgh home.