Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 22 June 2017

Public Accounts Committee

University College Cork and University of Limerick: Financial Statements

9:00 am

Dr. Graham Love:

If I could summarise it very quickly, I will explain that in fact we had done the due diligence on this deal and approved it. If I could hold our hands up and say, we had not processed the paperwork sufficiently on time that weekend that was covered in the RTE documentary to effectively hand over and approve it. Our interim chief executive, Anne Looney, did so over the weekend with the then president of UCC, such that the paperwork was completed early that Monday morning. We were in a position to say the deal was good. We had not concluded the paperwork and we put our hands up on that front, but in fact we were satisfied the deal was okay.