Mr. Francis Doherty:

I will give the committee one example. The long-term CEO had entered into a contract to rent a building on St. Stephen’s Green. The cost of the lease was around €2 million per year for 20 years. It was a full commercial repair and insure lease, which was unusual for the organisation to take on. The leadership team at that time arranged for approximately 100 to 120 individuals to take up occupation of that building. A number of changes were made to the structure as a result. These invalidated the fire certificate to such an extent that Dublin Fire Brigade wanted to shut the property down. This became apparent because my deputy at the time was given a handover by the previous deputy to flag that these issues existed. It was an extreme point where the fire brigade was saying the building needed to be shut down.

The issue in this regard was obviously twofold. There was the safety of the staff and service users. There was also a financial risk if the service was closed, because the DHRE would stop paying to cover the rent for the building, and the trust was on the hook for €2 million a year for 20 years. We arranged with the consultants preparing the audit of the building and the technical works required to eventually manage not to clear their payments but to make some payments in order that they could prepare and give us reports they were withholding because they did not get paid. The issue then became that the works identified in that one single service came to nearly €900,000.