Senators have refused to accept the Office of Public Works' decision that they should move to the Natural History Museum for over a year to allow for urgent repairs to be made to Leinster House, it has emerged.
The need to move the Senators, which was revealed last Friday, dominated a meeting yesterday morning of the Senators' Committee on Procedure and Privileges, which is chaired by the Cathaoirleach, Senator Pat Moylan.
Last night, it was understood that the majority of the committee's members had demanded that the OPW returns to them with a number of relocation options, rather than simply laying down the move to the museum as "a diktat".
However, the Senators fully accept that they have to move out of the Upper House chamber because the repairs needed to Leinster House are serious and substantial.
In a bid to end the controversy yesterday, Senator Moylan told members of the Upper House that the committee had met and "is in adjournment to allow the Office of Public Works to investigate fully all possible options for any such relocation, together with feasibility studies.
"The matter rests there and the committee will report back to the House when it has fully considered all options put forward and is in a position to make a recommendation," Senator Moylan said.
"Until then, I request members to leave the matter within the remit of the Committee on Procedure and Privileges, where the matter will be fully considered," he added.
The disagreement between the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, which has accepted the OPW's recommendations, and the Senators' committee has raised significant questions about the legislation that set up the commission.
Tasked with running the operations of the Oireachtas, the commission, however, does not have the power to overrule the committees of procedures and privileges in either the Dáil or the Seanad.
"There is absolute fury that the Senators knew nothing about this until it was first published, and that a move was raised with Pat Wallace [ the director of the Natural History Museum] only a remote possibility," said Senator Joe O'Toole.
"There is no doubt in the mind of any fair-minded person that the work has to be done, but the last time that the Senators had to move we were given five, six or seven options," he told The Irish Times. Senators are to meet today with the Dáil Committee on Procedure and Privileges to investigate the possibility of taking over the Dáil chamber during its non-sitting days, something that happened for a brief period during the 1980s.
The mood at the Senators' committee meeting yesterday was, according to some of those with knowledge of the proceedings, "quite angry - particularly over the way that Pat Wallace has been treated, which is not right", said one source last night.
Under the original proposal, the ground floor of the museum, which has a world-regarded collections of dinosaurs and fossils, would have been cleared to make way for the Senators, although little planning is known to have been done about where the exhibits should be moved to.
