EU fund unspent due to ‘inexperience’

The head of the Department of Education has rejected her minister’s claim that maladministration led to loss of more than €30m in dedicated job support.

Brigid McManus, the retiring secretary general, said inexperience and poor communication meant some of the €93m European Globalisation Fund was returned unspent.

This had been released in batches by Brussels to help retrain staff who lost their jobs at Dell, Waterford Crystal, SR Technics, and in the construction industry.

Much of the money was returned when training places were not taken up and predicted programmes did not come to fruition.

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn had blamed the failure to find opportunities on which to spend the entire allocation on “maladministration”. However, Ms McManus said it was part of learning curve.

“I would fully accept that we did not manage it as well as we might have if we knew then what we know now,” she said. However, she said it was a complex scheme in which they “got more right than wrong”.

She told the Public Accounts Committee that applications under the fund were better to be over-estimated initially instead of requesting a lower amount and the fund being oversubscribed. She accepted not enough was known about the demand from the various employee groups before the money was requested of the European Commission.

She said the time frame for making an application was too tight to allow a full assessment on the likely needs of former workers.