Deputy O'Malley gave me notice of his intention to raise on the Adjournment the subject matter of Question No. 11 on today's Order Paper.
Adjournment Debate: Bula Mines.
This question relates to the payment of the £9.4 million which was authorised by an Act of the Oireachtas we all recall passing through this House, the Bula Limited (Acquisition of Shares) Act, 1977. It was passed by both Houses on 23rd March last and, I presume, signed by the President some time after that when it became law. As will be recalled, the purpose of this Act was to enable the Minister for Industry and Commerce to buy 24 per cent of the shares in a private company called Bula Limited for £9.4 million, not to be invested in the company but to be paid to four named individuals and the personal representatives of a fifth named individual through their holding company called Frolic Investments, which name was changed afterwards to Bula Holdings.
In the course of that debate which went on, between the two Houses, for about six weeks altogether and in which I was involved for four weeks here, various facts came to light which the Minister had not told the House about until I drew the House's attention to them. It is not necessary for me in the very short time at my disposal and for the purpose of this discussion to go through all those facts that were deliberately concealed by the Minister in some of the cases, and of which he was totally ignorant— ignorant, I would suggest, in a blameworthy way—in relation to others, when he did not know about the background details of the matter at all. But there were many such facts, one of which came to light and which is directly relevant here, that is the fact that Bula Holdings, to whom the Act envisaged the payment being made on behalf of the individuals concerned, no longer owned the shares and that 80 per cent of the shares in Bula Limited in fact were owned by a company called Norfin Nominees Limited.
Since I spoke on the matter last it has come to my notice that Norfin Nominees Limited, in another case of a public quoted company where they were registered, as in this one, as security for the very large sums of money advanced to them, refused— as they are perfectly entitled to do; I am not criticising them in any way at all—to carry out the request or direction of the other shareholders, the beneficial shareholders and of the beneficial shareholders' directors in that company but, instead, took certain other steps in order to protect their own lending and the money that was due to them. Because of the extraordinary delay in the payment of this money by the Minister one is entitled to ask at this stage: Has something similar happened in this instance? Is it because the money has now to be paid to Norfin Nominees Limited that this situation arises? Are Norfin Nominees Limited—as they are perfectly entitled to do—seeking to protect their own rights in the matter? I am asking that question. If that is the case I am not in any way criticising them because they are perfectly entitled, in the interests of their own company and lendings, to do so.
The fact is that the money was not paid on the due date and has not been paid since, notwithstanding the passage of three months and three days, according to my calculation. What I was told by the Private Secretary to the Minister was the due date plus the fact that no effort has been made— as was made clear here today—by Bula Limited or by their prospective 49 per cent shareholders, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, to pursue a planning application lodged originally in July, 1976, and that suggests to me, and I think to anybody who looks at this matter in a reasonably objective manner, that, for one reason or another, this whole proposal envisaged in the Act to which I have referred is not now going to be proceeded with.
I want to say straightaway, of course, that if this is the case, as it appears to be, this party would welcome that fact. We regarded this as an outrageous proposal and we have even more cause to regard it as such now, in the light of all the facts that were concealed deliberately from us but which we unearthed. But, just as much as we would welcome it, clearly the Minister would find it extremely embarrassing and would try, as he now appears to be doing, to cover up these recent developments, delays and changes of plan until after the imminent general election has been held.
I asked specifically, I think, three times today—I have not got a copy of the supplementaries because those facilities are not available to me as they are perhaps to the Minister— what was the reason for this delay and I got no answer. It became very reminiscent of what went on here in February and March this year—no answer, no answer, a continual process of this. Finally, on pressing the matter very strongly, I was told by the Minister today, in a rather vague way, that there were legal delays. I asked him what was the nature of the legal delays and I got the no answer situation. We are entitled to know what, if any, are the so-called legal delays. "Legal delays" are words that could cover a multitude. They could mean that there is some technical problem between the solicitors on one side and the solicitors on the other about the use of certain words in the deeds, or some other purely technical matter that could be sorted out in a matter of a couple of hours if the parties to the arrangement had the will to do it. On the other hand, the words used, "legal delays", could cover a fundamental rethink on the whole matter, an effort to draw up a new agreement, to amend the secret agreement of 12th December, 1975, or, as we recommended to the Minister that he should do, an effort on his part to get out of that secret agreement. We asked these questions in the only way open to us to ask them in this House, and we got no answers. We are entitled to protest that we got no answers. If people begin to draw conclusions in these circumstances, from the refusal of the Minister to answer, then the Minister cannot complain at such conclusions being reasonably drawn in the circumstances.
The Minister spoke only two or three words today and that was to dispute my statement that the first instalment of 50 per cent of this money was due and payable on 9th February, 1977. I was informed of that fact by his Private Secretary on the telephone when he was asking me to agree to take the Bill quickly in the hope that it would be passed quickly because it had to be enacted before that date. I understand that subsequently that date may have been amended to either 10th or 11th February, but it makes no significant difference. The fact that it is a date at that time is borne out by the Minister's own statement in his opening speech on Second Reading on 1st February, 1977, in Volume 296 at column 511 of the Official Report:
Let me point out, by the way, that this money is payable in instalments, 50 per cent within 90 days, 25 per cent within one year and the remaining 25 per cent within two years.
The 90 days to which the Minister refers there is the date that the arbitrators made their decision and, somewhere between 9th and 11th February is 90 days after the date of that decision.
Another of the endless possibilities about the extraordinary lack of urgency which now exists, compared with the extraordinary urgency which existed in January and early February, may well be that the Minister is having second thoughts—as he suggested he might have—about paying money to people who promoted a company part of whose assets now seem to comprise State-owned minerals, a company who own and are proposing to mine minerals under land that they bought where the ownership of those minerals is 100 per cent vested in the State. It seems to be carrying the socialist idea farther than any of us could have envisaged the Minister for Industry and Commerce carrying the socialist idea, to be paying money for the right to participate in the hopeful future extraction of minerals some of which are owned by the State itself. All of the minerals could have, in any event, been acquired for the State under the provisions of the 1940 Act by the Minister making an order that did not contain the technical defects which the High Court and the Supreme Court found in the original order made in relation to these minerals.
At a time when our officially registered unemployment figure is 115,000 and when the actual unemployment figure, including the young people who are not officially registered as unemployed of which there are, unfortunately, tens of thousands, is 145,000, it seems incredible that the Minister shows not the slightest concern with trying to get this company to press ahead with their planning application to the Meath County Council but is quite content to allow the situation to lie as it is with unanswered queries from the Meath County Council who are the planning authority. These queries are on a very large number of points and are likely to lie unanswered for many months.
The Deputy is now entering into the area of another question.
I am very happy that the moneys referred to in Question No. 11 have not been paid to the people concerned. Those people and their new-found partner, the Minister, have not found it worth their while to pursue the planning application without which no steps whatever can be taken in this matter and without which there is not the slightest chance of any jobs being created, not just this year but in the next two, three or four years, depending on the terms of the planning permission. That permission will ever be granted is uncertain as I understand that there are several hundred objectors in that locality. The planning application, which was lodged last July and which was sent back to the applicants either at the very end of 1976 or the beginning of 1977 and which is, therefore, not now before the planning authority, does not contain an application for the single most necessary aspect of this whole proposed operation, that is permission for the conversion——
The Deputy is clearly straying. I have permitted him to raise Question No. 11.
That is on the extraordinary non-payment of this money which is 50 per cent of £9.54 million which the Minister himself told us, as I have quoted from column 511 of the Official Report of the 1st February, was payable within 90 days of the arbitrator's award. I asked the Minister why it has not been paid and he refused twice to tell me. On the third occasion he told me there were legal delays. When I asked what they were, he sat down. We are entitled to know why the money has not been paid and when it is going to be paid. We cannot be fobbed off with the answer that the Minister gave to me that he did not know, it depended on the lawyers or some words to that effect. I am quite sure that the people concerned who have been owed £4¾ million since 9th or 10th February must, indeed, be anxious about their money. If I were owed £4¾ million for the last three months and three days I would be hammering at the door of my debtor for my payment to which I would be legally entitled. Is that not the position here or has the Minister made a new agreement whereby this money will not be paid at all? Is it now proposed not to go ahead with the project as originally envisaged in order to save the Minister embarrassment? It is proposed to make no announcement about it until after a general election has taken place? It is very unlikely at that stage that the Minister will be there to make the announcement.
A great deal of the speculation that must go on in relation to this arrangement is caused by the fact that the Minister without precedent has pushed through this House a Bill which ratified an agreement for which no Member of this House other than himself or presumably a Member of his Government is responsible. Many of the questions which one must ask nowadays could or would be asked in a different way or might not have to be asked at all if this extraordinary effort on the part of the Minister had not gone on and had not been continued as it has. The debate on the Bill in this House has demonstrated why the Minister had to be so secretive. There were numerous things which he sought to cover up and which were uncovered by us. There may well be just as many things which would embarrass him equally and which we may in the course of time be able to discover. The questions which were asked today and were not answered should now be answered and if the Minister persists in his usual performance he has only himself to blame for a further increase in the suspicion which this matter arouses.
I leave it to the judgement of any neutral reader of the record as to whether the questions I was asked today were answered or not. We could all offer opinions about that but I ask people to read the record and to consider the questions and answers. In all cases I believe that clear, unequivocal answers were given. In the 20 minutes at his disposal Deputy O'Malley addressed himself very little to the matter which he purported in this question to raise and he talked in as general terms as he could endeavouring to widen the debate and to have a re-run of things that were discussed at great length in this House.
The question I was asked related to payment of moneys and the amounts and dates. I answered that question absolutely unequivocally. Deputy O'Malley invented an extraordinary urgency and he then replied to his own invention of extraordinary urgency by what he now describes as an extraordinary lack of urgency. One is as much an invention as the other. There is no extraordinary lack of urgency. There is the perfectly normal procedure of closure and a perusal of the official record of both Question Time and of this debate will indicate that he put words into my mouth that I did not use and he attributed opinions and actions to me, opinions that I do not hold and actions that I did not do.
With regard to Norfin Nominees Limited, they have not been involved in the completion procedures. Those procedures are being conducted between Bula and myself—not in the person of myself but by my Department and the relevant advisers. There is no extraordinary lack of urgency or delay. The Deputy can be quite reassured on the question of renegotiation or the question of an altering of direction or intention. A Bill was passed enabling me to do certain things and I am in the the course of doing them. That I cannot put an exact date for their completion would surprise nobody unless he was determined to be surprised. Least of all it should not surprise somebody with legal experience.
What interests me with regard to the question itself and raising it on the Adjournment is the approach of Deputy O'Malley. It seems to me to be negative and destructive, although I do not want to use that word abusively. The person on the Opposition side who best understood the legal situation was my predecessor, Deputy Lalor, and I am glad he is in the House to hear me say it. He well understood the legal constraints.
I do not purport to quote exactly what Deputy O'Malley said but I wrote down some words at the time. He said that all of the minerals could have been acquired by the State by an order under the 1940 Act; in other words, if I had continued with the policy I inherited. Had my advice been that that could have been done I had no objection to doing it. I came in with no preconceived ideas and had that offered me the best of the possible solutions certainly I would have followed that course. The reason I did not do so was because of the advice I received which seemed overwhelmingly correct and which I gave to the House in the course of the debate. Since Deputy O'Malley has again raised the matter that I could have made an order and gone ahead, perhaps I should briefly refer to that situation again.
I share the Deputy's unwillingness to have delays. I must believe it is as sincere on his side as it is on mine but the path of making a new order ran the risk of far greater delays than we have had. Even if success had been possible to gurantee—which it most emphatically was not—there was the enormous risk of paying compensation not for the valuation of one-quarter but for the entire lot. That was said over and over again in the House. Deputy O'Malley can ignore it or say it was not so if he wishes but I have told the House it is so and we simply get to the stage where it is his word or my word. The path of making another order was one which presented the alternatives of enormous delay or, if successful, of possibly enormous cost——
Has the Minister avoided all delay?
Neither of those was an acceptable alternative. Deputy O'Malley has interrupted me to ask if I have avoided all delay and of course, I have not avoided all delay. There had been delay from the autumn of 1970 until I got a Supreme Court judgement early in 1974 which was not avoidable anyway and which resulted from a process I did not set in train. With regard to delay, I am not trying to apportion blame. Deputy O'Malley is trying to apportion it to me but if one looks at the time scale the process set in train in the autumn of 1970 resulted in considerable delay long before my time. I am persuaded by the balance of advice that persisting on the course, no doubt taken in good faith by the Department and by my predecessor, would have resulted in even greater delay.
When there is a messy legal situation —and regardless of who was Minister for Industry and Commerce at the time there was a messy legal situation which none of us wanted—delay was inherent in the situation. I suggest that the path of doing nothing with regard to Bula was not acceptable and the path of persisting, in the face of the advice I received, in the previous policy—which was undertaken no doubt in good faith —was not acceptable either. Therefore, the path I took was the correct one.
What interests me in the debate is that while there has been enormous concentration on the minutiae of the situation and a great use of the word "extraordinary" with regard to things that are not extraordinary but are quite normal as Deputy O'Malley knows, the alternative strategies were not discussed by the Opposition at all. While they spent a great deal of time telling me what I did wrongly, they did not for a moment suggest an alternative course of action which they believed would succeed. All they did was to reiterate that I should make another order and that I should persist in the policy undertaken. I have given overwhelming reasons why that was not the correct thing to do. Once those reasons are given it is not an alternative which the Opposition could persist in saying I should do——
A further delay of four years and four months proves how right we were.
Once they were in possession of those arguments the Opposition could not persist in saying that I should continue on that course. They only do it for the purpose of raising an issue which they know to be unreal. It is a perfect example of the seriousness of the debate from the Opposition side that it comes out as four years and four months between the date of judgement of the Supreme Court and the present time because no sort of artithmetic makes it four years and four months. It is an example of their lightheartedness in relation to available facts and the timetable.
The resuscitation of this matter is a further effort at a destructive approach which I do not believe represents the opinion of supporters of Fianna Fáil and I do not think it represents the opinion of Fianna Fáil as a whole.
Why not make the payment?
I have said we are in the course of completion and the Deputy knows, as well as Deputy O'Malley, that that is a normal procedure.
Not at this stage.
What is interesting is that the hope I expressed that the blood-letting would cease, that we would try to reconcile people and get on with the work, is being ignored by the Opposition. There is a total absence of a constructive and peaceful approach, of an effort to reconcile conflicting parties. There is a continuous effort to sow doubt and uncertainty and pursuit of the policy that in Opposition anything goes. If an Opposition are to be credible they must be constructive——
When will the Bula Mine go into production?
A great deal sooner than if any other policies had been followed.
The Dáil adjourned at 5.30 p.m. until 2.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 17th May, 1977.