UL President does not deserve pity for her Oireachtas performance
President of the University of Limerick, Professor Kerstin Mey.
While watching a quite remarkable session of the Public Accounts Committee, the uninitiated might have been tempted to feel sorry for the president of the University of Limerick, Professor Kerstin Mey.
Over the course of a torrid three hours, Prof Mey was questioned aggressively and at length about the seemingly bottomless pit of governance failures that is UL.
Her answers were at best inadequate, at worst incoherent.
I wouldn’t be feeling too much sympathy for the professor.
If you’re a seasoned watcher of Oireachtas committees, you get well-versed in evasive answers, with public servants entering the arena wanting to give away as little newsworthy information as possible. Their interrogators are well aware of this, and everyone gets along just fine.
Where this committee hearing differed is in how blatant Prof Mey’s unwillingness to answer questions really was.
Ordinarily, a secretary general will mask their lack of cooperation in practiced civility, or expressions of regret.
Prof Mey went one further and refused to answer even the most basic of yes-or-no-answer questions.
Three examples spring to mind.
Under questioning from Wexford TD Verona Murphy, Prof Mey was asked a very simple question — had she received media training ahead of the PAC hearing?
The answer was yes, earlier this month, via a consultancy company called Blue Yard, helmed by former Fianna Fáil press secretary Mandy Johnston.
It took Ms Murphy 23 attempts to get the professor to answer the question. Twenty-three, I went back and counted.
Ms Murphy deserves an award for persistence, though the fact five minutes of committee time was eaten up by such an irrelevant query is an indictment of the UL officials present.
Prof Mey did provide an answer, generally waffling about her team strengthening its leadership abilities, on each of those 23 occasions.
It’s just that it wasn’t the answer Verona Murphy was looking for.
Finally, the president admitted first that she had been provided with media training “earlier this year”, and then, when asked what month she had received it, she said “May”.
Why, that’s this month! Who’d have guessed?
And that was just the beginning.
Five minutes later, the UL president was asked by Fianna Fáil’s Paul McAuliffe if she believed that the university had paid above market value in acquiring the former Dunnes Stores site in Limerick city for €8.3m in 2019, that transaction being the focus of almost the entirety of the three-hour PAC hearing.
No valuation was delivered to UL’s governing authority ahead of the purchase and the site had been valued at just €3m two years previously.
Mr McAuliffe asked, and he asked, and he asked, and then he asked again until he was blue in the face. And finally, three minutes later, Prof Mey replied that the university has “no regrets” over the transaction.
And then there was the question of whether or not a protected disclosure had been made with regard to the Dunnes acquisition.
Prof Mey at first denied outright that such a disclosure had been made, only to row back under questioning from Cork TD James O’Connor.
A protected disclosure was indeed made on the matter, one which was subsequently withdrawn.
Her PAC performance isn’t pitiable — it's extremely relevant.
Why? Because Prof Mey wanted to have her cake and eat it too.
UL was at the committee to tell anyone who’d listen that the institution is now “much changed” after a decade of misgovernance and that this had been achieved as a result of “resolute action”.
They’re so well-behaved now that the Department of Higher Education has even seen fit to release the €3.7m in State funding it had frozen on foot of concerns over those governance misadventures.
Yet, along with her inability to answer any of the queries put to her, Prof Mey also sought to defend the fact that a report by KPMG into the Dunnes purchase, one which has informed a complete realignment of UL’s governance structures, hasn’t been shown to the governing authority’s members because to do so could lead to litigation.
Think about that.
There are people on the body charged with running UL who may well be sanctioned in that report.
They may be, but they don’t know because they haven’t seen it. So how on earth can they continue to serve on this or subsequent iterations of the governing authority?
It’s a clear conflict of interest.
The Dunnes purchase predates Prof Mey’s tenure as president, it’s true, but she’s been at UL since 2018.
She is saddled with the baggage of the university, whether she likes it or not. The only way to jettison that baggage is to genuinely change the governance of this institution,and to behave with transparency — she failed to do so yesterday morning.
It may well be the worst performance in the recent history of the PAC. And believe me, that is saying something.
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