Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 11 October 2018

Public Accounts Committee

2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 13 - Office of Public Works
Chapter 6: Lease of Offices at Miesian Plaza

9:00 am

Photo of David CullinaneDavid Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Buckley and his staff. An awful lot of this has been made very complex, unnecessarily so, in my view. I just want to simplify and contextualise some of it, if I can. In terms of the documentation, we do not have the correspondence the Committee of Public Accounts received previously on what is before us. Just so I am clear, and the Chairman or the Comptroller and Auditor General might be able to clarify this, the Comptroller and Auditor General's special report deals with the Miesian Plaza and the failures in process that his office identified. That is fair enough and we will deal with them. The correspondence we have now got, which is PAC correspondence from a Mr. John Dowds and Mr. Alan Morgan, is from 2014, and there was a separate report at some point in 2017 that we will get. Certainly, the 2014 letter talks about multiple property transactions and then potential issues such as mistaken, superficial judgments by the surveyor, hidden but legitimate considerations, ignorance of the market by the negotiating body or person, poor negotiating skills, compromised negotiating positions and corrupt actions. We should say there is no evidence whatsoever of any corruption but that is what was said. Am I right in saying the concerns in the 2014 letter and the 2017 report were not in regard to the building that is subject to the Comptroller and Auditor General's report and it was a more general concern that these two individuals had? Is that correct?

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