THERE WAS ‘FAILURE OF GOVERNANCE’ BY JUSTICE

THERE was a culture within the Garda of withholding information, providing inadequate information and keeping issues internal to avoid external scrutiny, the Public Accounts Committee’s report into Templemore has found.

It follows an internal audit that uncovered dozens of bank accounts connected to the Garda College, with public money apparently being spent on entertaining and retirement gifts.

On Templemore, the report found: ‘There was an assumption within AGS that the Garda College was different to other public sector bodies and exempt from certain rules.’ Surplus income was retained, instead of being handed back to the Exchequer, which was ‘not acceptable.’ The committee also said there were failures of corporate governance by the Justice Department.

‘It tolerated, if not giving its blessing to, the kind of practices there were in Templemore,’ said member Catherine Connolly TD. The report also found that the transfers of large amounts of money from a bar account to the restaurant account at the Garda College was ‘irregular and unacceptable’.

It questioned the appropriateness of the Garda College bar and restaurant holding credit union accounts, and said an independent investigator was only granted access to credit union accounts earlier this month.

Garda management was given several opportunities, over the past decade, to address the problems but failed to do so, the report said. At one PAC hearing, the Garda Commissioner said her senior management team was new and that, in her opinion, tensions were inevitable during large organisational change.

The new Policing Authority said yesterday that it ‘noted’ the significant findings of the PAC report.

These will now be ‘examined and considered formally’ at a meeting of the Authority next week (Thursday, July 27). And it will assess Garda internal audit reports ‘as part of its preparation for reporting to the Justice Minister’.

The official report on the Oireachtas website comes with embedded links to testimony given at PAC hearings – at which Garda Director of Finance Michael Culhane was frequently at loggerheads with his civilian audit colleagues. Over nine years ago, in April 2008, an internal examination by Barry McGee first highlighted ‘significant issues’ with financial management, governance and public compliance at Templemore.

But Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan says she only learned of them exactly two years ago, in July 2015, despite a long stint as a member of senior management. The probe, which was followed by others, looked into the issues at Templemore.

That 2008 report came to the conclusions that they were all ‘operating outside of Governmental accounting regulations and public financial procedures’, and made a series of recommendations to remedy the outstanding issues.