Deal has the hallmarks of a scandal - Questions on Siteserve deal

LAST year, when the excitement around the appointment of Seanad hopeful and Donegal petrol station owner John McNulty to the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art died down, the Government knew that it could ill-afford another self-inflicted, embarrassing, and stinking-to-high-heaven controversy.

They simply had to get to the general election without stepping on another homemade landmine but they have not managed to put even six months between themselves and that shabby outbreak of gombeenism. Already they seem impaled on a more lethal-looking stake.

The Sitserve controversy — it may be just too early to call it a scandal but it shows all the signs of making the grade — just refuses to go away. It is almost as if it was written to a well-tried-and-proven formula: A loss-making state asset sold off at, reputedly, a €105m loss; the usual golden-circle firms greasing the wheels of the deal; and the country’s richest man, billionaire Denis O’Brien, looming large in the background. There is too the inevitable but spurned bid, one supposedly far better than the successful one.