Worker living in Agriculture Dept cottage for €104 a year

The Department of Agriculture is renting a cottage it owns to a staff member for just over €100 a year, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

The details were included in a report by Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) Seamus McCarthy to the Committee of Public Accounts.

“When I read this chapter my jaw dropped,” Green Party TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh said. “You lost a forest.”

The report found that there is no centralised estate management system in place for the department’s “valuable and diverse property portfolio”.

At the end of 2022, that portfolio included “85 buildings and plots of land”, and is set to “grow substantially in the future with the planned incorporation of the six fishery harbour centers and their properties,” Mr McCarthy revealed.

A lack of oversight led to the department having “gained a Georgian house,” Mr Ó Cathasaigh said, only to discover that there is someone living in it.

Confusion over a cottage which the department owns “has led to a member of staff” living there for “€104 a year,” the deputy recounted.

The department lacks “full control” over its lands, and it does not know who has the right to cut turf on bogland it owns, Mr McCarthy said.

Nor has the department assessed “the risk of encroachment” to the value of its properties, he added.

Five properties are claimed by the department and the Office of Public Works, the C&AG said.

“In the last five years, the department had discovered 24 plots of land and buildings that should have been recorded on its asset register.

“These are often identified following receipt of an external query, such as in estate cases or boundary queries,” he revealed.

“We accept all of the C&AG’s findings and we’re implementing them,” Secretary General of the Department of Agriculture Brendan Gleeson told the committee.

Meanwhile, a senior civil servant has said the suitability of the person who owns the slaughter plant at the centre of an RTÉ Investigates exposé may not have been assessed when a licence to operate the plant was issued.

Mr Gleeson told the committee that he has reviewed the files on the licencing of the plants at Straffan, Co Kildare.

“It wasn’t evident to me, looking at the file, that the suitability of the person – an individual – was part of the final process of approval,” he said.

“The focus of the examination was on the suitability of the premises – hygiene issues, physical infrastructure, and the various systems, quality control systems required.”

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Mr Gleeson said that he has “reflected on the process for approving the plant, because there are obvious, legitimate questions about the history of the owners of the plant.”

“There is nothing about this that doesn’t require us to do a root and branch review of everything – everything – we do,” Mr Gleeson said.

Serious animal welfare abuses and cruelty were uncovered in the treatment of horses that were being sent for slaughter at Ireland’s only licensed equine abattoir.

The behaviour was secretly filmed in a building used by Shannonside Foods Ltd in Straffan, where the company keeps horses before they are brought across a yard to the kill room in the slaughterhouse.

The issues were uncovered as part of wide-ranging investigation into Irish and European equine industries by RTÉ Investigates.

Operations at the premises in Co Kildare were “fully suspended” following the broadcast of the programme last month.