We could go with that oft-used fob-off — that ‘lessons will be learned’.

Except that, in this case, clearly lessons were not learned given that, in 2019, UL overpaid by €3m for a property it didn’t need, hadn’t valued, and has never found a use for, only to go one better just three years later in overpaying by a staggering €5.2m for 20 houses to be used for student accommodation that didn’t even have planning permission to do so.

First Dunnes, then Rhebogue

The new report is welcome in that it comprises an official, published review of two utterly notorious property transactions for which there had previously been nothing tangible, other than media reporting, for the taxpaying public to inspect.

The 2019 transaction — for the acquisition of the old Dunnes Stores building in Limerick city — was covered by a KPMG report which has never seen the light of day due to ongoing court actions.

But this new much-anticipated C&AG report has indeed been published, and the comptroller Seamus McCarthy has done the State some service in finally directing some much-needed sunlight at the nooks and crannies of UL’s past governance.

If you’re not familiar with the C&AG’s reports, they tend to cover subjects of financial imprudence in objective, rather dry terms.

So when the auditor describes the university being slapped with a local authority warning for developing the 20 houses at Rhebogue without planning permission as “an undesirable and unnecessary outcome”, it is the equivalent of the most withering put-down.

The report notes that value for money was most certainly not achieved in terms of that acquisition, and that there was no reason for that to have been the case, if the most basic of due diligence and the university’s own control procedures — put in place post-2019 to ensure that the Dunnes Stores fiasco could never be repeated — had been followed.

Why, it wonders, did those promoting Rhebogue seek to justify the maximum price payable for the houses, rather than fighting to pay the minimum achievable?

Why indeed.

In truth, little of what is revealed in the report is new — though, as one relieved UL source noted post-publication, “every word of it is true”.

Reasons for hope

The report’s value, one must hope, will come in finally drawing a line under UL’s disaster years, and allowing the institution — whose positive reputation academically has been utterly at odds with its governance disasters — to move forward into a more pleasant land, where sound decisions are made for the good of the university.

There are good reasons to hope that will be the case.

Under the university’s acting chief officer Shane Kilcommins, many on campus feel that the culture is changing for the better.

Professor Kilcommins, who is also the university’s provost, has made the right noises since the report’s publication on Friday, noting that all of the C&AG’s findings and recommendations have been accepted. He said: 

Though the future of UL is bright as it is an essential public good, the institution must face the issues of the past and be committed to learning from these mistakes and rebuilding trust through tangible actions.

Good luck to him.

And yet still, where is the accountability? UL is far from the only third level institution in Ireland afflicted by madness and administrators behaving with impunity, but it is the most consistent. 

In private enterprise, should someone lose the company €8.2m on two transactions in three years, they would likely never work again.

In reality, UL’s tale of woe is just the same trope of the €336,000 spent on the Dáil’s most ridiculous bike shelter writ large.

There is never anyone to blame in Ireland when taxpayers’ money gets set on fire, just the royal ‘we’.

‘We’ got it wrong. And lessons will be learned. But not for long.