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A COUNTY COUNCIL was forced to pay back over €1.2 million in government funding after an internal audit found miscoded invoices and money drawn down before any work had taken place.
Mayo County Council had been awarded significant funding for tourism and amenity projects in the county as part of a fund to support outdoor recreation by the Department of Rural and Community Development.
However, a departmental audit of the scheme found major issues across five separate grants to the local authority resulting in the repayment of more than €1.2 million.
A copy of the report details how auditors first examined a €200,000 grant for development of a 45-metre suspended cycle bridge as part of the Achill Island Greenway.
It found that €27,000 in invoices had been “miscoded” from other projects. Another €32,000 had been spent on the scheme on underground ducting and professional fees.
However, the local authority had drawn down the full grant even though a tender for the bridge had come in three times over the budget estimate.
The report said: “The local authority has, during the audit, admitted to drawing down the grant without incurring the requisite expenditure and has informally requested additional grant funding.”
As a result of the findings, the auditors decided they would look at other grants that had been paid by Mayo County Council through the scheme.
For a section of the Clew Bay Greenway, the council had been paid €250,000 in funding.
However, the report said: “There has been no work done to date and hence the grant was drawn down on 30 October 2019 in contravention of the terms and conditions of the scheme.”
An examination of grant payments of €200,000 for improvements to the Great Western Greenway Network was also undertaken.
This involved the construction of two short stretches of trails to take cyclists away from main roads.
One of the stretches involved was “substantially complete”, the report said, but work on the other section of the greenway had not even commenced.
The investigation said most of the expenditure had taken place after the grant had been paid and that there were around €16,000 in “probable miscoded invoices”.
Another €200,000 was paid out in grants for a project known as The Way – A Spiritual Journey, a 1.5-kilometre extension to a canal-side walk in Ballinrobe.
The audit found that there had been no work completed on the project when the full grant was drawn down as well as some “small miscoded invoices totalling €8,000”.
It was a similar story with €200,000 in funding for the Bangor Trail and Erris Access Bridge, which included a 130-metre suspension bridge.
The report said: “There has been minimal works done to date and hence the grant was drawn down on 31 October 2019 in contravention of the terms and conditions of the Scheme. There were some small, miscoded invoices.”
Internal auditors said the findings were a “cause of some concern”, recommending that changes needed to be made to the scheme around how local authorities reported spending.
A spokeswoman for the Department said additional inspections and audits had resulted in the full repayment of over €1.2 million by the council.
This included around €1.1 million for “decommitted projects” and a sanction for €161,400 in spending on projects that would proceed and “can be delivered in a reasonable timeframe”.
She said: “Mayo County Council is finalising an implementation plan, to be agreed with the department, for the projects which are to be delivered over the coming months.”
A statement from the council said they were actively addressing the matters that had been identified in the determination of the department.
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Retrofitting is only available to the people with plenty of cash . Same as most other benefits .
All I read in the above article is that we need to lower our living standards drastically. I do not trust anyone who tells me we need to eat less meat and then replace it with processed crap.
@An Drew Bearla: Yes, all that came out of the big meeting in Davos is that we must stop eating meat and dairy or the world will starve, and we must share our cars or cycle or walk, all the mullarkey Ryan is spouting and all from a bunch that then sat down to a four course meat laden lunch after flying in on 1500 private jets. The narrative to blame the ordinary consumer and deflect away from their lavish carbon laden lifestyles is ridiculous. Animal farm springs to mind
Will do this, will improve that. All talk and no action. The government has no motivation to implement any of these policies. Still using diesel commuter trains ffs.
@Tomo: We are making progress faster than ever before. I would live to speed it up too, but denial of what’s happening is nor helpful.
Bottom line is what comes out of our chimneys and out of the vehicle tailpipes isn’t good for us and has resulted in worse health for our population and more deaths. Even if you think climate change isn’t real (it is) then only a fool would continue to not tackle us poisoning ourselves.
@Barry Somers: a few more new taxes will sort everything.
That’s the problem, the greens solution is to tax the problem with no alternative. Of course, people are turning against it
@Jim Buckley Barrett: Not true.
@Nicholas McMurry: Yes it is true. Tax tax tax from a fella that knows about as much about climate change as my 8yr old. All the solutions Eamo is pushing for at present are financially or infrastructurally unviable like hydrogen which is inhibitively expensive to make or offshore wind which we have no way due to planning restrictions and lack of infrastructure make, but which are the chief objectives of E3G which ol Eamo is/was a senior associate of, as usual the self serving bull we have gotten used to in Irish politics. Any man that signs off on tax incentives for fuel for private jets and the writing off of carbon footprint for such is not green. No viable alternatives for anything, no reduction in our carbon footprint despite all the waffle, lying about our agricultural footprint throwing our farmers and food producers under a bus because they are a soft target while letting big corporations off the hook by giving them all our carbon credits from our grasslands, hedgegrows and forestry. Ireland is not one of the worst polluters as we are so often told to justify taxing the life out of us we just fall foul of the carbon credit rules that the large industrial countries set up to make themselves look far better than they really are, America, Germany France etc
@Nicholas McMurry: of course its true, if the government and greens in particular wanted to actually do something that wasn’t a punitive tax measure, it would be a shock.
Insulation is the most effective measure, yet they persist in making the retrofitting policy, part of the convoluted seai scheme which requires “trained” certified installers, when homeowners could, depending on their current skills learn to install it just as effectively themselves, by watching a few instructional videos, just like the “trained” installers did…
Subsidising insulation for domestic projects with a zero vat rate, would encourage more people to retrofit insulation to their homes themselves, reducing the amount of heating from all sources, along with particulate and carbon emissions across the board.
Better put the old age pension up. Where will all the food come from? More homes will be needed.
Anyone find those TRVs (main image) a complete waste of time?
I find that after a year the da*n thing is stuck on full heat. (I’ve checked the pin underneath and it seems to move freely) Was this just another way for the plumbers to make a few bucks :) ?
So, if we live in England or Wales and insulate our homes we could live for 836,000 years. I don’t want to live that long.
Why does an article in an Irish publication write about a foreign country without stipulating that it is a study done in that foreign country?
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