A vacant Dublin building is to be sold on the open market after its owner, the Health Service Executive, failed to secure the interest of any State body in making use of it.The Weir Home, an Edwardian nurses’ home on Cork Street in Dublin 8, was to have been converted into housing by the Peter McVerry Trust. However, the deal collapsed after the homeless charity became mired in financial and governance crises three years ago.The HSE has spent more than two years trying to drum up interest from other parties, including different housing bodies, Dublin City Council, the Land Development Agency (LDA) and any other State agency which might need office space or other accommodation, but no one has been willing to take on the large protected structure.After exhausting all avenues, the Health Service Executive said it “will now progress to dispose of this property on the open market in line with the HSE’s Property Protocol”.The imposing four-storey redbrick building, named after Scottish philanthropist James Weir, who funded its construction, was built in 1903 to accommodate nurses working at the Cork Street Fever Hospital. It remained a nurses’ home until the late 1970s.From the early 1980s, it was used as a mental health facility, but due to its age and condition, the HSE relocated its residents to Grangegorman, on the north side of the city, about five years ago.Situated in the grounds of Ireland’s oldest remaining Quaker cemetery, the Weir Home is one of the largest vacant buildings in the HSE’s portfolio of assets.In 2019, the Peter McVerry Trust announced it had agreed to take on the building with a view to its conversion to apartments for homeless people leaving emergency accommodation. However, the plan never progressed, and in 2023, it emerged the trust had been subject to misgovernance and lax financial controls. A series of damning reports by housing and charity regulators and the Comptroller and Auditor General, the public spending watchdog, followed.[ Dublin’s James Weir Home to remain in State handsOpens in new window ]While the trust continues to provide services for homeless people, its housing development function effectively ceased. The Health Service Executive had already vacated the Weir Home some two years before the difficulties in the trust came to light and the building has not been in use since. The building “is surplus to HSE requirements”, it said, and “in accordance with its statutory obligations”, it has been offering it to “State Stakeholders”.Dublin City Council said the building had been under consideration for social housing but “as a protected structure only minimal structural intervention is allowable; therefore it is not likely to meet standards in terms of accessibility, energy efficiency without significantly altering spatial layouts”.Specialist conservation-led construction would “significantly increase development costs”, the council said. And “it is not possible to maintain the heritage integrity of this building and to viably fund the delivery of cost-effective social or affordable housing”. The Land Development Agency said it was offered the Weir Home by the Health Service Executive last October. “Upon assessment, the LDA concluded that the site’s potential was not of sufficient scale to enable the delivery of affordable residential development for the purposes of the Land Development Act 2021.”Until last month, the HSE still had “one State Stakeholder” that was interested in the site, but it said this transaction did not proceed.“The HSE will now progress to dispose of this property on the open market in line with the HSE’s Property Protocol.”Earlier this year, the HSE decided to offer a similar historic building in Dublin 4, the former Baggot Street hospital, on the open market, as no State agency was willing to take it over.