Category: Documents

All is not well in Galway City Council

Guest post: Enda Cunningham is a news journalist with the Connacht Tribune Newspaper Group in Galway, where he has worked on a freelance and full-time basis since 1997. He is also a regular contributor to several national newspapers and radio stations and while he is an ‘all-rounder’, he has particular interests in the areas of planning, property, business and finance. He can be contacted at ‘enda AT ctribune DOT ie’. We have previously covered his work on this site. – Mark

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Environment Minister John Gormley might be wasting his time with the remit of his ‘planning review‘ in Galway County Council, when a probe into their counterparts in Galway City Council could throw up some real gems, as I discovered.

There’s a lot of info in this post, so please bear with me.

When it comes to paying Development Contribution Levies, some builders in Galway City have been a bit lazy, and it’s taking the Council up to three years to chase up some of the debts, such was the leeway being given.

In fact, the Council is currently owed around €5.4m in unpaid development levies, €1.3m of this is being chased up through the District Court and High Court, while the rest is the subject of enforcement orders or is being paid by installment.

The single biggest debt relates to the abandoned Crown Square development in Mervue – headed up by Padraic Rhatigan of JJ Rhatigan and Walter King of GK Developments – where almost €2.1m is owed.

I had a lengthy sift through a couple of dozen Galway City Council planning files which turned up some very interesting information on several of the biggest developers in Galway during the boom years, but the real golden nugget that emerged from my investigation that must surely be a real cause of embarrassment for officials – a typo on a planning condition which could cost the Council €468,389.29.

Basically, where the Council should have sought development levies for all 120 residential units in one particular development, they instead specified ‘apartments’ – of which there are only 28. Continue reading “All is not well in Galway City Council”

Bank inquiry PAC documents

The Oireachtas has published a set of documents released by the Department of Finance in relation to the bank guarantee scheme. This is on the Public Accounts Committee page. Unfortunately the Oireachtas published many as individual documents, and did not OCR them. To help anyone who wants to read the documents, I have combined them into two PDFs and OCRd them:





That Fás 'slush fund'

Fás is back on the news pages today, this time it’s about a “slush fund” which the Department of Enterprise Trade and Innovation is accused of ‘sponsoring’ between 2002 and 2008. The fund, also known as the Competency Development Programme, was a sort of grant scheme for organisations who were to use the money to up-skill staff. There are serious questions being raised about how it was administered and monitored.

The latest company which benefited from the CDP to come under the microscope is Foras Training. Today’s Irish Independent…

A COMPUTER-TRAINING company that falsified the number of people on its courses was paid almost €1.3m by the state agency FAS.

The midlands-based company — which was named in the Dail yesterday as Foras Training — claimed for people whom it had not trained.

It also had only one properly registered trainer out of 25 for courses that it delivered on behalf of FAS. The company printed its own training certificates, instead of registering them with a certifying body.

Furthermore, as Roisin Shortall noted at the Public Accounts Committee yesterday, bodies associated with social partnership benefited enormously from the CDP. Many of these bodies would have had representatives on the board of Fás. The Irish Times covers the committee meeting here.

A number of months ago myself and Gav began looking as Fás from a number of different angles. During that process we obtained documents relating to the CDP. These gave us list of companies and the figure for funding they received each year. Interestingly a large number of those in the CDP were local authorities. Why a semi-state body would be funding a state body to train civil servants, I struggle to understand.

I’ve put together a spreadsheet with the names of organisations who received funding, see below. The figures are not included as of yet because the spreadsheet was auto-extrapolated from PDFs of scanned pages; the software used to do this seems to have been confused by some fonts involved so the numbers would not be reliable if I were to publish them now. I’ll manually insert these into the spreadsheet in the coming week and post again then. I will say that the first thing I noticed was that the annual totals increased massively from just €500,000 in 2003 to more than €50 million a few years later, then fell by almost 50% afterwards. Strange, during a period of pretty much full employment.

Companies; Fás Competency Development Programme 2003-2008

Whatever about the annual totals or reasoning behind the fluctuations, that just half of the organisations in receipt of finding were being monitored for how they spent the money or who was being trained, according to the C&AG, is scary. That’s a helluva lotta money slushing about…

The main beneficiaries, at first look at the spreadsheets, were IBEC, ICTU, Mandate and ISME. It appears the Unions and ‘representative’ bodies between them took a large slice of the whole pie. There are also few companies with intriguing directors listed. I may get around to these in the next blog post, but I’ll have to pick a few legal brains first

ST: 'Fas in new cronyism row over lease'

Very busy. Will add context later. Our piece from this week’s Sunday Times. Related documents here.

FAS, the state training agency, is renting a warehouse from the former tax partner of a consultancy firm which has been “consistently successful” in tendering for work from the agency.

Unit 9 at Tolka Valley business park in Finglas, north Dublin, has been rented since 2000 from Terry Oliver, formerly of OSK, an accounting and business consultancy. Internal audits have concluded that Greg Craig, the former head of corporate affairs at Fas, had a conflict of interest in awarding contracts to OSK because of his close personal relationship with Oliver.

Craig was suspended as the audit was compiled, and has since returned to the state training agency as head of health and safety.

According to documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information act, the Finglas warehouse was to be used to train apprentice plumbers and electricians. It appears no-one has ever been trained there and instead it has been used for storage or left empty due to concerns about it meeting planning standards. The rent is more than €40,000 per annum. Fas was given legal advice in November 2000 that it should ensure the building was fit-for-purpose and met the required standards before signing the lease. It is not clear if this happened.

Before the lease was signed, emails between Fas staff and solicitors noted that the then manager of finance and administration at the Finglas training centre, Patrick Kivlehan, wanted to see the lease signed off “as expeditiously as possible”. Kivlehan is now head of internal audit at Fas.
In 2003, local management attempted to cancel the lease as the building was surplus to requirement. Oliver disputed the cancellation. Local management was later overruled. In 2005 the lease was extended to run until November 2011.

In February 2007 Richard Keegan, a Fas Building Services specialist, was asked to assess the site’s suitability for training apprentices. He found it didn’t have a “fundamental requirement” to hold courses for trainee plumbers and apprentices working with electronics. Keegan also noted in an email to management that the unit was not fire-safety compliant and would require planning permission before it could be used. He said the local Fas centre had “closed down the building in the past” because it “didn’t meet basic health and safety standards”. Email records show that last October, local Fas management again attempted to get out of the lease. “We looked into negotiating an agreement with the landlord but there was not a successful outcome,” wrote Robert Nicholson, a local manager. Legal advice was that the lease was “watertight”.

Nicholson said that altering the building would not be cost effective, nor would sub-letting, as the market for that type of site was too weak and “significant work” would be required to bring it up to the required standard for a tenant. It is believed Fas has paid nearly €400,000 in rent to Oliver, since the lease began. Thousands more has been spent on maintenance costs. Oliver refused to answer questions about the building, claiming it was a matter for Fas. The training agency confirmed that the warehouse is being examined as part of an ongoing internal audit. Internal auditors in Fas have already concluded that there was a “conflict of interest” arising from the fact Oliver and Craig were friends. Oliver, who retired recently from OSK, provided the Fas executive with personal financial advice.

OSK was found to have done a considerable amount of consultancy work for Fas in the early part of the decade, the majority of which related to corporate affairs. “OSK has been consistently successful when applying for work from corporate affairs, whether directly, via advertising agencies, or via Fas procurement,” an internal report concluded.

The preliminary reports into Irish banking collapse

… or “scoping reports” as they’ve more recently been referred to.

The narrative An Taoiseach and Minister Lenihan are attempting to set appears to be: “this scoping exercise says it was solicitors, bankers and auditors” and “we must focus the inquiry on the areas found to be clearly to blame”. That helpfully excludes policy implementation, i.e. Government. And it doesn’t stand up when reading the actual documents.

A summary of the Regling-Watson report is now available here. The one for Governor Honohan’s report will be completed later.





Honohan:

Domestic policies did not act as a sufficient counterweight to the forces driving this unsustainable property bubble. Bank regulation and financial stability policy clearly failed to achieve their goals. Neither did fiscal policy constrain the boom. Indeed, the increased reliance on taxes that could only generate sufficient revenue in a boom, made public finances highly vulnerable to a downturn. Specific tax incentives also boosted rather than restrained the overheated construction sector. And, with surging labour demand, wage rates in both the public and private sectors moved well ahead of what could protect international competitiveness.

Deaths in Garda custody

Another person died in Garda custody yesterday. These stories are consistently let slide.

Below is a list of known deaths in custody since 1997 compiled over a few hours. I don’t think it to be absolute, though I cannot find reports of others after quite some time searching. Most have source links though some were found using Lexis Nexis. I found reports about 36 deaths. There has been two or three deaths each year on average, yet already this year four people have died in the care of the Gardai.

Notably all those who died were males. A disproportionate number seem to have died in one of three Dublin stations, Kilmainham, Tallaght or Store Street. This perhaps could be attributed to the size of these districts.

List below the fold. Split per year.

Continue reading “Deaths in Garda custody”

DDDA report

“Published” this afternoon, but still not up on the Department of Environment website. It doesn’t look much different to the leaked version of the report we published back in March.

I asked the Department to email me a copy. 13 attachments, some in Word format, some in PDF. So I stuck them altogether into one PDF, for your convenience:



Ombudsman has "serious concerns" about Fahey statements

We’ve obtained a copy of a letter sent by the Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly to the chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture and Fisheries. Dated May 11, the letter, which was alluded to in Thursday’s Irish Examiner, relates to Frank Fahey‘s appearance in front of the committee last week. Deputy Fahey was there to answer questions on the ‘Lost at Sea’ scheme. In it Ms O’Reilly seeks to correct or clarify a number of claims made by Deputy Fahey. She says she has “serious concerns in relation to the accuracy” of Deputy Fahey’s statements.

The letter is below and has been scanned and OCRd. The Committee chairman Johnny Brady (FF Meath West) has confirmed it is legit.

Av’ an ol’ goo… Continue reading “Ombudsman has "serious concerns" about Fahey statements”