Departments told they should prepare unused properties for immediate sale

GOVERNMENT departments have been told they should prepare unused properties for sale immediately and surrender them to the Office of Public Works.

Chairman of An Bord Snip Nua Colm McCarthy said the OPW should compile a comprehensive inventory of all state assets and publish the details of all leases and rental agreements.

It said commercial confidentiality was not a good enough reason to keep these details private.

Mr McCarthy said even with depressed land prices there was no economic sense in keeping hold of sites in the hope values would go up.

“It is all very well saying it should have flogged its surplus properties in 2006, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t do it now,” he said.

Mr McCarthy said government departments and local authorities were not good at managing their balance sheets and legislation should be introduced by the end of the year to centralise the handling of land assets with the OPW.

He said in some cases his group had found it difficult to get proper balance sheets off the departments.

In the private sector no good business would hold onto assets it did not need and similarly the state had to be careful not to carry unnecessary properties, he said.

He made the case for a de-leveraging of the economy nationally, which means to offload assets and use the cash to break free from debt burdens.

The group did not examine the case for selling off lucrative commercial entities like Aer Rianta, Bord Gáis or the ESB, but yesterday Mr McCarthy said this had to be considered.

“Obviously there is a permanent option to privatise more of the companies [the state] continues to own,” he said.

He pointed out that the National Treasury Management Agency was currently “selling government paper like billy-o” by seeking international buyers for billions of euro in state-backed bonds every month.