It is now a full year since it was announced that the scandal surrounding Dundee’s Olympia was to be the subject of an independent inquiry.
What has happened in 12 months? What has been done in 260 working days?
In October we were told Edinburgh-based law firm Burness Paull had been engaged.
Dundee City Council said: “An experienced firm of solicitors has been appointed to carry out the inquiry, the terms and conditions of which have agreed with them.
“They are carrying out the work discussed, and a report will be brought to the council’s city governance committee in due course.”
Apart from that, nothing.
Have councillors or council officers supplied oral or written information?
Have they expressed their feelings on Olympia through the medium of interpretive dance?
We don’t know.
Because Dundee City Council, in its usual state of near-comatose inertia, hasn’t said a thing since this statement.
No information given to you on how your money is being spent on your investigation into what went wrong with your leisure centre.
‘Efficiency and communication’
Perhaps there are good reasons that updates can’t be given?
Are there, Dundee City Council? Tell us about them.
How have other inquiries around the country performed?
The results of the independent inquiry into Construction of Edinburgh Schools were published in February 2017.
You may remember an external wall at Oxgangs Primary School fell down on January 29, 2016.
They took a year to organise and hold an inquiry, then collate and publish the findings.
The Scottish Hospitals Inquiry was set up in August 2020 to investigate patient deaths at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and Royal Hospital for Children in Edinburgh.
It took until this year to publish its interim report.
It was a complicated, many-stranded inquiry, chaired by The Right Honourable Lord Brodie KC.
The difference is, though, that inquiry set up a website explaining everything that was happening, when it was happening, and all the documents it examined were made available for the public to view.
Far from having an explanatory website that publishes documents, Dundee has barely said a word about its progress.
Even the much maligned (deservedly) Eljamel public inquiry has at least managed to publish its draft terms of reference.
I’m not, I firmly point out, comparing the substance of these inquiries – the Olympia probe is not a public inquiry so it cannot compel witnesses to testify.
I’m commenting on efficiency and communication.
And the medical inquiries are, I concede, much better funded than the Olympia inquiry.
But it doesn’t cost much to give a quick update. The silence on the Olympia inquiry is embarrassing for Dundee.
‘Asleep at the wheel’
What is our council leader Mark Flynn doing about this?
Is our luxuriously-paid chief executive Gregory Colgan overseeing the running of an inquiry involving his council? If not, why not?
Does Gregory realise how badly organised this makes his administration look – and how it makes him look?
The man appears to be asleep at the wheel.
Solicitors, Burness Paull, what are you doing? What can you tell us?
If there are reasons you can’t give further updates then explain, even in broad brush terms.
All of you – Gregory, Mark, councillors, council officers, Burness Paull – do any of you respect the people of Dundee?
This inquiry is going to happen, isn’t it?
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