Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 4 May 2017
Public Accounts Committee
Bord na gCon: Financial Statements 2015
9:00 am
Mr. Brendan Gleeson:
I did not say I did not know.
To come back to the question, and only for the purpose of clarification, there is a convention - it is a circular - that if one State organisation wishes to purchase an asset from another State organisation, if the Department of Education and Skills, for example, wants to buy a site from Bord na gCon or any other organisation for the purposes of building schools, there is a process defined by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that involves obtaining a valuation from the Valuation Office which is binding on both parties. The reason for that rule, I guess, is that there is a desire to avoid a situation where a public body would have to enter into a bidding war with private developers in the context of providing a public asset. That is the reason the rule is there and the process that the chief executive has described is consistent with that circular and consistent with that rule.
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