‘No information’ on €91m direct provision payout, says secretary general

Department of Justice secretary general Oonagh McPhillips. Picture: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

The head of the Department of Justice has said “I simply don’t have any information” regarding the fact it paid out more than €91m in direct provision contracts in breach of public spending laws.

Oonagh McPhillips, the department’s secretary general, told the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday that the direct provision “brief has moved bag and baggage”. 

We’re not placing those contracts anymore, we don’t have the responsibility anymore,” she said.

The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth assumed overall responsibility for the running of the direct provision system in October 2020 from the Department of Justice.

It found that €91m worth of direct provision contracts awarded by its predecessor to commercial accommodation providers breached public expenditure law as the deals were awarded without a full e-tenders process.

E-tenders is the State portal by which private companies and individuals bid for public contracts.

The money in question relates to 151 separate contracts.

“When we had the responsibility, we dealt with it the way we dealt with it,” she told Sinn Fein’s Matt Carthy.

I simply don’t have any information to help you with”.

Separately, the committee heard that a disused 150-acre site in North Dublin has increased in value by €4m over the past two years, despite it not being viable for housing development.

Thornton Hall, a site first purchased in 2005 for €30m with a view to building a new prison there to relieve the accommodation pressures being felt at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin City, was never built upon by the State.

Some €50m has been spent on the site, including its purchase costs, over the past 17 years.

Ms McPhillips said that her department felt that a prior valuation in 2020 of just €2.7m “didn’t seem reasonable”, hence the new valuation — carried out by commercial estate agents Lisneys — of €6.5m.

“The most recent valuation is based on the existing use and agricultural zoning, and takes into account the quality of the agricultural land, location, and road frontage,” a briefing note prepared for the PAC said.

The review “specifically does not take into account any increased value based on a rezoning or alternative State use of the land”, the department said.

Asked how the site had been seen to increase in value by €4m in just two years, Ms McPhillips said that the 2020 valuation, carried out in-house by the valuation office, had only been a “desktop exercise”. That particular valuation followed one carried out in 2015 which valued the site at €2.4m.

In the Irish Prison Service’s annual statement of financial position meanwhile, the value is maintained at its historic cost of €49.3m, something the service says is warranted due to it being “a strategic State asset with potential future use value”.

However, Ms McPhillips acknowledged that the Thornton Hall site, situated roughly 15kmnorth of Dublin City centre, has not been deemed appropriate for housing development by the local authority, Fingal County Council.

She said that while the site may not be suitable for housing, it may work in terms of “other strategic infrastructure”.