Further questions for FÁS after 2-day Mount Juliet board meeting

FÁS has defended its spending record after it emerged the agency held a two-day board meeting in a luxury €300 per night hotel last week.

The meeting took place in the Mount Juliet Hotel, Kilkenny, just days after the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan, ordered an investigation into spending at the agency.

News of the junket has prompted the Labour party to question whether the state’s employment and training agency is fit for purpose.

The party’s finance spokeswoman, Joan Burton, said it was “extraordinarily insensitive” to the thousands of people who are losing their jobs.

“We are entering a stage where by Christmas there may be 300,000 people unemployed. The work that an agency such as FÁS does will be absolutely vital in terms of giving hope and opportunity to people who have lost their jobs. The leadership of the organisation needs to set out a very clear and urgent programme of reform and they need to cut out the frills,” she said on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland programme yesterday.

Chairman of FÁS, Peter McLoone, insisted there was no misuse of taxpayers’ money: “What we try and do every year is to organise a meeting, a long meeting, over two days once a year, and the purpose of that meeting is to carry out an extensive review of our activities — what outcomes have been achieved in the previous 12 months, and what challenges face the board and the organisation in the period ahead,” he said on Newstalk yesterday.

“I don’t have the details of the costs, our meetings are actually scheduled a year in advance, and it’s a difficult job to get people who are not employed by the organisation, to give up two days of their time in order to attend.

Chief executive of FÁS, Rody Molloy, will be questioned at the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday about how the organisation’s €1 billion budget was spent.

Ms Burton said Mr Molloy will have to show committee members that he “has a strategy as to how they are seriously going to help and assist the people who have become unemployed”.

She said: “FÁS really has to understand that the party is over and they have to return to their core business otherwise there will be very severe questions over their fitness for purpose.”