Mr. Sean Angland:

We made a number of attempts to dispose of the property at one point. In the first instance, as the Comptroller and Auditor General set out, it was a property which HIQA acquired from a predecessor body, the Irish Health Services Accreditation Board, which was wound up on the establishment of HIQA in 2007. All of its assets and liabilities, as well as property, were transferred to HIQA. As the Comptroller and Auditor General set out, the property was not of use to HIQA.

We attempted on several occasions to ask the OPW to take the property on to its portfolio and allocate it elsewhere in the public sector. However, the OPW did not want to do that. We made efforts at various stages to dispose of the property through the private sector. We engaged with an estate agent in 2009 to do that but, again, that did not prove successful. That reflected where the market was then. For several years, through the Department of Health, we persuaded another public body to occupy it to ensure the public was getting value for money for the period of the lease.