Fisheries body allowed employee to rent its €1.25m property, PAC hears
Business development manager Suzanne Campion said “the tenant had to be removed from the premises, the locks changed, because they weren’t paying their rent”.
The informal tenants of an 19 th century Victorian house, owned by Inland Fisheries Ireland, were an entry level employee of the organisation and their spouse, an Oireachtas committee has heard.
The tenants were allowed to lease two cottages at Aasleagh House – a property valued at €1.25m –in Co Mayo between 2017 and 2021 as IFI had been unable to sell the remote property.
At Thursday’s hearing of the Public Accounts Committee IFI chief executive Francis O’Donnell acknowledged that leasing the property to a staff member “was a mistake and shouldn’t have happened”.
Business development manager Suzanne Campion meanwhile noted that the property had been taken back from the house’s previous tenant, a commercial contractor, and the locks changed as “they weren’t paying their rent”.
IFI’s appearance at PAC comes amid alleged governance failures, with five members of the board having resigned over the past year leaving it incapable of reaching a quorum in order to make decisions.
Mr O’Donnell, who told the committee he himself had holidayed at Aasleagh House in 2020 and 2021, said he had no knowledge of the reasons for those resignations as the relevant letters had been sent directly to Enterprise Minister Eamon Ryan.
He said he had a good working relationship with the board notwithstanding those resignations.
Mr O’Donnell said a Garda criminal investigation into alleged fraud at IFI was currently under way.
He said the matter related to “timesheets and rosters associated with certain staff”, none of whom are current employees of IFI.
He added both he and other members of IFI’s executive were subject to a 17-month campaign of “harassment and intimidation” involving “very, very serious letters” being sent both privately to those executives and to Mr Ryan.
The committee heard the roughly 300 staff working for IFI “are feeling very deflated” after a year of acrimony within the organisation, which still has only two serving board members.
Despite this, Mr O’Donnell, who took over as CEO in November 2020, denied there had been a "civil war" between the board and the executive. “I think we’re being very credible here today,” he said.
He agreed when his primary base of employment changed from Citywest in Dublin to Ballyshannon in Donegal — where he lived — in 2021, on foot of an informal agreement between himself and the then chair of the board, it should have been actioned via a full board decision.
He said there was “nothing sinister” or “sneaky” about how the move had been actioned. However, comptroller and auditor general Seamus McCarthy said the move would have had “implications for the claiming of expenses”.