Last night the Taoiseach described the debate on Carysfort as part of a campaign of vilification against him. As has now become his custom, he fought back by making counter-allegations against the Opposition and by questioning our motives. The tactic seems to be that if you muddy the water enough you cannot see the shark and that tactic has been in evidence again tonight.
The Taoiseach stated that Fine Gael and The Workers' Party had enthusiastically supported the Government decision to buy Carysfort and that we had now taken a politically opportunist U-turn. I reject this completely. The Workers' Party position on Carysfort has been absolutely consistent. When the Estimate for the purchase of Carysfort was presented to this House exactly 12 months ago, I welcomed the decision by the State to purchase it. I welcomed its use by UCD as an educational facility and the consequential release of additional student places in UCD. I still hold that view because I have always believed and argued that Carysfort should be kept in education. A point the Taoiseach has chosen to ignore is that I also questioned why the State had not purchased Carysfort when it first came on the market 18 months previously, as I had been pressing them to do. On 18 December last year in this House I stated: "Had that opportunity been availed of the State would have got better value for money than it is now getting for £10 million". Nothing could be clearer. I pointed out that because of negligence by the Department of Education the State was paying £10 million to buy back a facility which had been provided by taxpayers' money in the first place. Finally I queried the quasi-private nature of the education for which the college was to be used, a concern I still have and to which I will return.
From an educational point of view there is no dispute about the desirability of keeping Carysfort in educational use and of allowing UCD to use its facilities. I have never questioned that and it is disingenuous of the Taoiseach and the former Minister for Education to continually make the educational case when the questions being addressed to them concern the political and business aspects of the affair. We are having this debate not because Carysfort was bought for UCD but because of what we now know of the political and business history of the Carysfort purchase. It does not hang credibly together.
We now know that the State paid more for Carysfort than it needed to. We know that initiative for UCD to purchase Carysfort came from the former Minister for Education and not from UCD, as both she and the Taoiseach previously claimed. We know that UCD were less than enthusiastic about Carysfort and were made an offer they could hardly refuse. The vendor, Mr. Pino Harris, was offering Carysfort to UCD within days of having purchased it himself, even though it had been on the market for six months previously. Why did he buy it? We know that prior to the purchase of Carysfort by Mr. Harris, neither the Taoiseach nor the former Minister for Education had shown any interest in buying it. We know that the normal procedures for a purchase of this kind, that is the routing of the request through the Higher Education Authority, were not followed. That was at a time when nobody else was bidding for it and the owner was desperate to get it off his hands and property prices were falling. The Government gave Mr. Harris a profit of at least £1.5 million and paid him twice as much as the official valuation of the property. We know that up to the publication of the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the evidence given at the Public Accounts Committee the Taoiseach and the former Minister for Education used every parliamentary trick in the book to avoid answering direct questions about the affair in this House and they have repeatedly given a bum steer to journalists who ask genuine questions about the inconsistencies of their story.
This debate is taking place because there is now a strong suspicion that the Taoiseach actively involved himself in the decision to purchase Carysfort in order at least to help out a political or personal friend and to net him a large profit at the taxpayers' expense or, at worst, that the Taoiseach was in some way involved in setting up a mezzanine arrangement whereby Mr. Harris was virtually guaranteed the profitable resale of the property before he even bought it. This is a most serious matter.
In any democaracy the public needs to have confidence in the integrity if not the politics of its Prime Minister. What is at the core of the Carysfort issue is the integrity of the Taoiseach. Many questions have already been asked, but the central question is whether the Taoiseach acted improperly in relation to Carysfort? Did he misuse taxpayers money? These are the questions which are being asked by people in their sitting rooms and they must be explored in this House. These are not allegations, innuendos or statements of villification, as the Taoiseach may wish to interpret them. The Taoiseach has had ample opportunity to respond to them, to explain what happened in relation to Carysfort and to assure us and the public that everything is in order.
Let us examine the Taoiseach's story. In summary, it goes like this. We are told that the possible involvement of UCD in Carysfort had been on the cards for four years, that the Taoiseach found some extra money in the kitty in late 1990 and that at about the same time UCD's plans to build a graduate business school at Roebuck ran into trouble. Therefore, there emerged a convergence of interest between all concerned —UCD get their business school, the Taoiseach can spend his surplus cash and there are extra third level places to impress the Programme for Economic and Social Progress partners. We are told that the deal was outstanding value for money. We are told by the Taoiseach that he had always been very interested in Carysfort and that the idea of buying it for the UCD Smurfit Business School was such a good one that he had two meetings with Laurence Crowley, a further meeting with the UCD President and that he rang the UCD President again to assure him that, despite the refusal by the Department of Finance, there would be money for the ongoing costs of the school. He and the former Minister for Education were so enthusiastic about buying Carysfort that they bypassed the Higher Education Authority, did not submit any memorandum to Cabinet and had it all signed, sealed and delivered in a matter of weeks. Paddy Masterson must be the envy of every college principal, semi-State chief executive, health board and vocational education committee chief executive officer and county manager.
The Taoiseach's case is that he is a go getter, who when he sees a good idea will get stuck in, sweep aside the red tape and get action. As for the vendor of the property, the Taoiseach says he had no meetings with him and he is not a friend of his. Indeed, in The Sunday Tribune of 29 September last the former Minister for Education is reputed as saying that she was unaware that the vendor was Mr. Pino Harris. I shall return to this point later.
The Taoiseach's story would be plausible if it did not have to be dragged out of him. One would expect that if the Carysfort purchase was such a great idea, and the deal was such good value the Taoiseach would have been more than anxious to share the good news with us and to tell us of his own leading role in landing such a bargain for the taxpayer. Bashfulness is not one of the Taoiseach's better known qualities. Yet, until the past couple of weeks the Taoiseach has seemed most reluctant to say anything about Carysfort. The first public mention of his involvement in the sale appeared in an article last February by John Walsh and Christina Murphy in The Irish Times. Following that article I tabled, in February, a Dáil question to the Taoiseach asking him to make a statement about the report. He transferred the question to the Minister for Education and it was subsequently ruled out of order as it “impinged on the collective reponsibility of the Government”.
Again, in October the Taoiseach transferred five specific questions which I put to him regarding Carysfort and as recently as last week he transferred a question to the Minister for Finance concerning his discussions with officials from the Department of Finance. He had an opportunity to tell his story on radio in September but he did not do so. He had a further opportunity to tell his story during the confidence debate in this House in October; but, again, far from seeking to claim credit for what is now described as an outstanding bargain, he seemed most anxious to distance himself from what he now calls "the transaction".
The former Minister for Education was no more forthcoming. She too started out by saying that the initiative came from UCD. On 12 February 1991 she took my question about Carysfort together with a Priority Question from Deputy O'Shea and she did not reply at all to the specific questions I asked about the role of the Higher Education Authority. She too was less then forthcoming in response to various questions put to her by journalists. At very least both the Taoiseach and the former Minister for Education showed a remarkable and untypical reticence in publicising what they now describe as an outstanding bargain for the taxpayer.
Carysfort is located in my constituency. Its closure as a teachers training college was a tragedy for this country and for the Blackrock area in which it is situated. The advertising for sale of Carysfort coincided with my election to this House and the very first thing I did in this House was to request the former Minister for Education to intervene and to prevent its sale. I argued then that because of the State's investment in the Carysfort buildings the Government should make an effort to keep it in public hands and for public education.
Although the former Minister for Education publicly declared her wish to keep Carysfort in education, she showed no inclination whatever to buy the property or do a deal with the Sisters of Mercy between July 1989, when it first came on the market, and July 1990 when it was bought by Mr. Pino Harris. I asked her specifically in August 1989, following a letter which appeared in The Irish Times from the former principal, to enter into discussions with the Sisters of Mercy in order to secure the college for public educational use. What the former Minister did was negotiate the repayment of £1.75 million in respect of the State's previous investment. This indicates clearly that she was more concerned about securing some cash return from the initial sale than in buying the college on behalf of the State.
The college buildings and the surrounding 20 acres of land came back on the market in February 1990 and I immediately wrote to both the Taoiseach and Deputy O'Rourke arguing that the State should purchase it. The Taoiseach, who now professes a long standing interest in the purchase of Carysfort, did not reply at all to my letter and the former Minister merely acknowledged it. I again raised the matter here on the adjournment on 17 May 1990 and any reading of the Minister's reply to me will show that there was no intention whatever to purchase Carysfort. What happened between 17 May 1990 and early September when she approached UCD to encourage them to buy Carysfort?
The only significant event was that Mr. Pino Harris purchased the college and the 20 acres for a reported £6.5 million. According to the documents lodged in the Registry of Deeds office, Mr. Harris' agreement to purchase the property was concluded on 26 July 1990. According to newspaper reports, the estate agents acting for Mr. Harris approached UCD about their interest in purchasing the property on 12 July 1990, two weeks before the formal conclusion of the sale.
One has to ask why Mr. Harris purchased this property in the first place. Dún Laoghaire Corporation in an area action plan had placed a planning restriction on the property that the building and the surrounding 15 acres could only be used for educational purposes. There was, therefore, no prospect of developing the lands. Mr. Harris would either have to use it as an educational institution or sell it onto somebody else who would. It is a known fact that there was not a great deal of interest by educational establishments in the purchase of Carysfort. A letter from Fenton Simons, Planning and Development Consultants, addressed to Dún Laoghaire Corporation on 8 February 1990 states that 190 United States universities had been circulated with an attractive brochure advertising Carysfort and that the same brochure had been sent to many London agents and educational institutions in the UK, Europe and Japan. Despite this extensive advertising, little or no interest was shown in the college. It was a buyers market then and it was a buyers market when Mr. Harris sold the college to UCD for a profit of £1.5 million in circumstances in which there was no other bidder.
How can anybody claim that this was outstanding value and a bargain for the taxpayer, particularly when the official valuation placed on the property was £3.8 million in August 1989 and when the former Minister for Education was able to secure the repayments from the Sisters of Mercy of only £1.75 million for the buildings which had been provided by the State in 1979 at a cost of over £2 million?
Before Mr. Pino Harris bought Carysfort there is no evidence whatever to show that either the Taoiseach or the former Minister for Education had any enthusiasm or interest in buying the property. All the evidence is to the contrary. There is no evidence to show that at the time the Government agreed to pay £8 million for it there was anybody else who was remotely interested in it. Therefore, what is the justification for paying £1.5 million extra to somebody who owned the property for only five months?
What of the alleged continuing interest in UCD by Carysfort? We heard about this again tonight and the Higher Education Authority's apparent continuing interest. It is true that attempts were made between 1987 and 1988 to link Carysfort to UCD but these efforts stopped in 1988. Why were they not revived? If they were real why were they not reactivated when Carysfort came on the market in July 1989 and again in February 1990? Why, during that time, when the Sisters of Mercy and the agents acting on their behalf repeatedly asked the Department of Education to buy it, was the UCD link not reactivated? I suggest it was not reactivated because it was dead and that until Carysfort came into the ownership of Mr. Harris, the Government showed no interest in buying it.
The story which the Taoiseach presented to us — and to which he is sticking — is simply not credible. There was no continuing interest by UCD; there was no intention by the Government to buy it before Mr. Harris got it and it is simply not credible to tell us that the decision to buy it was taken because surplus money was found in the kitty. We now know that the Taoiseach was involved in the discussions which led to the Government decision for UCD to buy it. What we do not know is whether there was any involvement between the Taoiseach and the sellers of the property. I am glad that the Taoiseach responded voluntarily to the question which I tabled — and which had been ruled out of order — asking if he had any meetings with the owners of the property or agents acting on their behalf. He was very specific and categoric, stating that he had no contact or any discussion with any of these companies or persons concerning the sale of Carysfort College at the time. He did not mention people acting on their behalf; I do not know whether there is any sigificance in that but he clearly put on the record that there was no contact between them. Therefore, it will not be possible at some future date to misinterpret that, should the circumstances arise, or in any way to be ambiguous about it. This is not a repeat of the Bernie Cahill episode, this is quite categoric.
There have been several inconsistencies in this whole affair. The Minister for Education initially stated that the project was initiated by UCD, not by her, although we now know it was initiated by her. The Taoiseach initially stated that he had no involvement and now it transpires there was an involvement. Commitments were given to UCD about funding for the ongoing costs of the college. The Minister for Education, in a newspaper report, stated that she did not even know who owned the property. That hangs very uneasily with the comments she made in this House on 17 May 1990, when she talked about the resale of Carysfort, as it was then. She said:
Currently talks are in progress, I understand, between the owner of the whole property and sub-sets who wish to purchase the school properties, the training properties and the surrounding 20 acres for use as education-training development. I assure the Deputy and the House that, while I am not formally involved in those talks, I am informally kept informed about what is happening and it might be said I have my eye very much on the matter.
It is very hard to belive that somebody would agree to pay £10 million to a vendor of whom they were not aware, in the light of the Minister's statement.
Finally I want to refer to two extraordinary matters in relation to the Department of Education. The first is that, following the publication of the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, they issued a statement saying that the Valuation Office valued only the land and not the building. That has been contradicted by the Comptroller and Auditor General, by the fact that the property on offer included the buildings and it has been implicitly contradicted by subsequent statements in this House. It has never been explained (a) why the Department should take the extraordinary step of issuing a statement and (b) why it transpired that the statement was not accurate. Secondly, the Department of Education have never explained why between 1979 and 1989 they failed to conclude an agreement with the Sisters of Mercy which would have protected the State's investment of over £2 million in Carysfort. If that agreement had been concluded the question of Carysfort being sold might not have arisen because it would have reverted to the State. The negligence of the Department of Education in not concluding an agreement over a ten-year period, particularly during the time when it was widely known that Carysfort would be closed, exposed this State to the loss of Carysfort as a facility and to the ridiculous situation of having to spend £10 million to buy back a property which had been provided ten years previously by taxpayers' money. That is an aspect of this whole affair which has not been sufficiently addressed and I hope it is one to which we will be returning.
