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.

If that was not enough, two former leaders of Fine Gael, one the current Minister for Finance the other one of his predecessors, are openly contradicting each other about details of the deal’s postmortem. That their disagreement just takes up where officials at the Department of Finance and IRBC left off just adds flavour and spice to the controversy. That the two men — Michael Noonan and Alan Dukes — are recognised as men of complete integrity just adds to the gathering public confusion and disquiet around the deal. That it gave Taoiseach Enda Kenny an opportunity to put his foot in his mouth again by suggesting that he’d be happy for the Comptroller and Auditor General to investigate the matter even though IRBC stands securely outside the CAG’s remit ticks another well-marked box.

That so many ministers are elbowing each other to get some wriggle room, each bemoaning the fact that this authority or that authority is not legally competent to investigate the deal, and possibly other IRBC deals, is a defence that’s worn threadbare over the years — but then politicians can say the electorate rejected the proposal that the Dáil should have greater powers of investigation at a referendum. It is entirely predictable too that such a toxic, potentially election-defining, future-shaping, optimism- sapping controversy should spring from the cadaver of the wretched Anglo Irish Bank albeit through the IRBC.

Mr Noonan has promised to try to establish a mechanism to investigate this and other IRBC deals but it is hard to imagine that such a layered transaction might be unravelled before the election. It seems at least unwise too that Mr Noonan be involved in setting up an inquiry at which he might have to give evidence. The Siteserve deal represents only a tiny percentage of IBRC’s responsibilities, but the suspicions in play are so representative of the insider-trading culture that all but ruined this country that Paddy most certainly wants to know what’s going on this time — simply because he feels he’s been fooled once too often.