THERE IS NO one in the country that believes it is a reasonable arrangement for a civil servant to be paying €104 in rent per year to live in a cottage owned by the State, Green Party TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh has said.
The arrangement was revealed in a report about the number of assets the Department of Agriculture owns and controls which was discussed at yesterday’s Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
The committee heard that some confusion over a number of cottages in Backweston estate, in Celbridge, Co Kildare, led to the department choosing to rent one of the properties, Stacumny Cottage, to an employee since 2011.
The report states that the arrangement was put in place “to mitigate against leaving the property vacant for lengthy periods of time and to prevent the property from becoming derelict”.
The cost of the rent at the cottage is €104 per year, according to the report – which comes out to just €2 a week.
We see some strange things at the PAC, week in, week out. But the contents of the C&AG's report on Estate Management in the Dept. of Ag. 🤯
— Marc Ó Cathasaigh TD (@MarcKC_Green) July 11, 2024
Bad news? We lost a forest.
Good news? We found a Georgian Manor we didn't know we had. With a tenant!https://t.co/WqtHA3vfCA pic.twitter.com/d9xXCen5Pw
The department said the the cottage has also been used to provide shared, temporary accommodation for staff on an ad hoc informal basis but there is no “clear business purpose or policy in place” for the use of the property.
A proposal is currently being drafted to allow visiting scientists to stay at the property, which the department hopes will support inter-laboratory collaboration with counterparts in Northern Ireland and other EU member states.
This proposal will involve some modification and renovation of the property to make it more suitable for use as short-stay temporary accommodation for visiting scientists.
Speaking to The Journal about what was revealed, Ó Cathasaigh said the department “has to regularise” its rental arrangements, stating:
“If they have an estate manager and as part of his contract he has access to a house, fine. But as a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I want to be able to examine that. I want to be able to see that in a contract.
“Similarly, this kind of rental agreement for €104 quid a year because they want to avoid vacancy and dereliction. There’s nobody in the country who’s listening to that, who thinks it’s reasonable.”
He said the role of the committee is to ensure everything is above board.
“If they have people living within properties, if we see a rental agreement that stacks up and makes sense, or if it’s part of a wider agreement about estate management, as a member of the PAC, I just want to be able to be sure that the taxpayer is getting value for money,” he said.
The committee was told the department has no “centralised” estate management system, meaning that, along with the cottage, a State-controlled forest was also incorrectly accounted for in their portfolio.
The report details that a visit to what was believed to be one forest plot owned by the Department in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow found that there was actually two separate sites at the location.
Ó Cathasaigh acknowledged that the department was handed a “basket case” when the Land Commission was dissolved as there was no register available of lands owned and managed by them.
While the department has said it has set out about compiling a register and identified around 2,660 hectares of non-agricultural land, over half of which has since been disposed of, Ó Cathasaigh criticised the slow pace.
The Land Commission was dissolved in the mid 90s, he said, criticising the lack of progress on an estate management system.
“It’s not tenable to say the Land Commission stuff was difficult. It was difficult, but it is three decades ago.
“You can’t be relying on that as an excuse 30 years down the line,” he said.
Concerns were also raised about properties not being valued on the assets register, with a nil valuation being recorded on the books.
“We, as members of the Public Accounts Committee, are entitled to know how much it’s worth, and they’re currently recording a lot of it as a nil value, because they say, ‘Oh, look, a valuation is only pertinent if we’re selling it or we’re exchanging it’. But that’s not good accounting practice,” he said.
The Controller and Auditor General is “not happy” with the recording of the nil valuation because it doesn’t capture the value, said Ó Cathasaigh.
Another issue highlighted was that the issue of turbary rights, which is where someone has the right to cut turf in a specific place for personal consumption of the household or where turf can be cut for commercial purposes.
Currently, the department does not have a register of turbary right holders for these properties and therefore does not know who has the right of access to these lands. The department staff also do not monitor the levels of turf cutting activity at sites.
Ó Cathasaigh said the department identified one commercial user who was extracting large amounts of bog turf with a big machine.
“They don’t seem to have any way of knowing whether that person actually legitimately has turbary rights on that land or not, because there doesn’t seem to be a listing,” he said.
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