Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It might have been the council. I will ask Seán Ó Foghlú separately to specify the position in respect of that final property. The heading is "Current/Proposed Use", and he gives the details of what is planned. There are costs involved in all of that, so I will ask him who is dealing with it and from where it comes. We can deal with the matter separately.

No. 1496B is correspondence from Trinity College Dublin. We wrote to John Coman, secretary to the college, recently seeking details regarding an incident of cyberfraud that cost the college €790,000 and also in respect of an associated cost of €184,000. This matter relates to the Trinity Foundation. Mr. Coman states that there is still a considerable amount outstanding. What I find extraordinary is his statement in the final paragraph to the effect, "I would also like to clarify the previous statement that the University has covered the loss from its commercial revenues". There is one set of accounts, including the State revenue and commercial revenue, yet Trinity is stating that this only came from the other half. It gets worse. Mr. Coman goes on to state:

... and therefore there is no loss of donor funds and no impact on the projects supported by philanthropic funding. To be more specific, the amount will be funded from revenue generated by visitors to the campus to view the Book of Kells and the Old Library.

He is saying there was a loss and that the money collected from visitors who viewed the Book of Kells and the Old Library was used to offset it. That is an extraordinary accounting process. I am just putting on the record that this is how Trinity says it recovered the loss. I do not know whether the college is increasing the charge to see the Book of Kells but it is kind of pathetic, and that is all I would say about that reply. We will note and publish the letter. It deserves to be published.

No. 1498B is correspondence from Michael Nolan, CEO of Transport Infrastructure Ireland, on the report of both project reviews that have been undertaken in respect of the national public private partnership, PPP, projects. We will note and publish that. I was almost skipping over that is because the file is so big; there are 546 pages in the report. People are welcome to review it but we have said we will come back to the issue of PPPs as part of our work programme.