Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Who is going to be held to account for what happened at Siteserv? That is the major question that is not being answered in any of our debates. It is incredible that the Siteserv sale by the IBRC included a significant write-down of €119 million to Millington, a firm controlled by Denis O'Brien. That money was to come out of the taxpayers' pocket. This happened at the same time that Siteserv was giving €5 million to its own shareholders. That a debt-laden firm in receipt of a €119 million debt write-down could simultaneously afford to shell out generously millions of euro in dividends to shareholders is incredible and wrong. We also see from the report that Arthur Cox acted for both sides of the transaction, those being, Siteserv and Denis O'Brien. This is extraordinary.

The sale of any product usually has the objective of attracting as many bidders as possible in order to increase the price. That is the dynamic in an auction and most sales. What we have in this situation, though, is a finding by the commission of investigation into IBRC that the opposite happened. Anchorage was not contacted about the granting of exclusivity to Mr. O'Brien. It was wrong that this would happen in a State organisation. The commission found that the sale process conferred on Denis O'Brien a significant advantage over the other bidders seeking to acquire the Siteserv group. This is incredible for our country. It shows that maximisation of the financial return to the taxpayer was not the primary goal of the actors involved in the sale.

That the chairman of the sub-committee in Siteserv, Robert Dix, would holiday with one of the proposed buyers in St. Moritz, Switzerland, during the sales process is incredible.

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Anybody with any idea of impartiality would have recognised that they were not doing their job right in that regard. The key point here is that one person gave another person an advantage. A person or persons, as quoted in the report, gave misleading or incomplete information to the IBRC, which led to an advantage being given to another individual at a massive cost to the State. What is the next step? This is where accountability has to be achieved by the State. There is no point in anybody talking about this issue here unless we achieve some mechanism to get accountability. If there is no accountability, then there will be no change. If there are no consequences, then it will be repeated again in the State administration in the future.

I have written to the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau, GNECB, requesting that it would investigate the authors of the misleading and incomplete information. I believe that An Garda Síochána needs to be given the necessary legislation so it can be the location of these types of investigations in future. Someone needs to be charged as a result of these actions. The Siteserv crisis was a massive crisis ten years ago. I remember at the time the Government was nearly in danger of falling. What happened? A commission of investigation was created to neutralise that political crisis on behalf of Fine Gael. It is a well-used political tactic used by governments. The investigations go for on so long that most people forget what they were about in the first place. The investigations are held in secret so that nobody knows what is happening. This is not justice. This report is not transparency, it is not accountability and it cost too much. Not only have the citizens had to pay for the loss of nearly €10 million in the original write-down, but the cost of the investigation was incredible. We were meant to have the final report in 2015 and it was meant to have cost €4 million, but here we are in the second half of 2022 and we just received the first of the original 38 modules.

In this Chamber the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, gave me an estimate that the final cost would be north of €30 million and, if they were to proceed to all of those 38 modules, it would be more than €70 million. Some €30 million is a multiple of the cost of the initial write-down of the commission’s investigation. It is no small money. It would have paid for seven primary care centres in this State in the year that the commission of investigation was created. This is not justice. It is incredible that an investigation of wrongdoing in Ireland costs so much. It have to be a bureaucracy that would end up spending €30 million investigating a wrongdoing that led to a cost of €8 million to the State. No business or individual would spend multiples of the initial wrongdoing cost to find out what the wrongdoing was and, at the end, have a report that is meaningless in terms of accountability.

My worry is that we will get this particular report, that it will end up on a shelf somewhere in a Department, that it will gather dust and that, in a number of years, what happened in this area will just be part of a table-quiz answer. So far, I have heard no meaningful expression in the Government about the next steps in terms of accountability.

The Taoiseach, interestingly, is also responsible for another investigation that went on for a long time, which is the €1.4 billion sale of NAMA's Project Eagle portfolio to Cerberus in 2014. The original finishing date for that was meant to be 2018. It got extension after extension and excuses were given for the delay. At one stage, an excuse was given that there was a skeleton staff in terms of the commission. The Moriarty tribunal is still happening, believe it or not. It still has a staff, a cost and a budget 24 years after it was established, at a price tag of €65 million.

There is a real problem here and that has to change. The commission of investigations system is not working. It is not producing justice, it is not producing transparency and it is costing way too much. It needs to be overhauled. There should be a permanent commission of investigation that builds up the skills and staff necessary to deliver, within legislation. It should have to do that work within budgets and within time scales. If we do not do that, we will simply create commission of investigation after commission of investigation, each providing a report, each of those gathering dust and with nobody being held to account. Those actions that caused the crisis and the consternation in the first place will be repeated ad nauseum. The question is whether that is actually the purpose of the Government. Is that the solution? It is not the solution for the people of Ireland.

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