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It has now been 20 years since Scotland got its own parliament. The last one had been 300 years before that. But the birth of it's physical home was plagued with huge controversy and the sudden deaths of not one but both the project's leading lights.

Enric Miralles and Donald Dewar

Fifteen years ago , the new Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood, Edinburgh was officially opened.

But as a new programme explains, the building's journey from conception to completion was plagued with controversies and eventually overshadowed by two sudden deaths.

The first episode of a new series, The Scandals That Shocked Scotland, tells the story of Donald Dewar's single-minded determination to get the building commissioned and then run a competition to appoint a visionary architect.

The winning design came from Catalan architect Enric Miralles but the initial cost of £40 million would eventually mushroom to ten times that amount — the final tally was £414 million.

The rising costs were, according to the programme, down to a number of disagreements.

According to the programme, the building was being ‘designed by committee’ — and not just any committee — a newly elected Scottish parliament of MSPs who reportedly felt slightly put out that they hadn't been consulted on their home's design sooner.

Interior of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood

Given the adversarial nature of politics, leaving warring MSPs to try to agree on common ground was a costly exercise. Should the new debating chamber, for example, take the shape of a banana or horseshoe?

But the saddest part of the whole business came in 2000. First, the architect Miralles, who had been very hands-on, . Cruelly taken from this world before his unexpected swansong was completed, he would never know that his extraordinary building was destined to .

Donald Dewar, by then Scotland's First Minister, said at the time: "I'm deeply sorry to hear this news. Enric Miralles was a man of great sensitivity and imagination, an architect with a growing worldwide reputation. His death is a great loss."

Donald Dewar in 1999

But sadly, just as the parliament was getting over the death of Miralles, only three months later another huge blow came when of a bleed to the brain, having returned to work following heart surgery some months previously.

He was 63, Scotland's very first First Minister, and his commitment to devolution for Scotland had earned him the affectionate title, ‘father of the nation’.

According to Paul Hutcheon, Political Editor for the Herald on Sunday, who was interviewed in the programme, it was a blow from which it took years to recover.

"That was a catastrophe — for us to lose our first first minister under those circumstances was desperately sad and it really knocked the stuffing out of the institution for the first few years".