Following on from last week’s report by the Comptroller and Auditor General on the contracts between the Department of Integration and the companies involved in providing asylum accommodation, Independent TD for Offaly, Carol Nolan, asked the Minister for Justice for further information on its findings.
As Gript highlighted last week, the report into a small sample of the centres – just 20 of the 320 currently in place – discovered major issues of non-compliance with the Department’s own criteria in over half of the cases examined.
These included massive disparities in payments both between the Department’s own calculated rate and between individual contractors. One Limerick hotel was paid €170 per night for single occupancy room; a Westmeath contractor was paid €74 per night for each apartment, and in another Mayo centre which has “pivoted” from Ukrainian refugees to IPAS the nightly rate was €55 per person. The State rate is €34 per individual per night.
As a reminder, the C&AG also found that 5,000 persons remained in IPAS accommodation at the end of 2024 despite having their application accepted.
In addition, the watchdog found that IPAS does not undertake due diligence on the “financial stability of the proposed accommodation provider” – and that IPAS pre-contracting “specified requirements were incomplete in many instances.”
The examiners also found insurance certification for only 13 of the 20 properties on file – and revealed that 19 of the 20 centres could not provide proof of ownership or lease.
Given that finding, Deputy Nolan asked the Minister “if he will provide the names of the international protection accommodation contractors for whom the recent Comptroller and Auditor General report could find no proof of ownership; and if he will make a statement on the matter.”
The response from Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, claimed that “Huge strides have been made over recent months in regularising the IPAS accommodation portfolio. New systems and procedures in place are already having an impact and this will improve incrementally over the coming months and into 2026.”
The Minister claims that action has been taken on all “five recommendations relating to due diligence documentation, contract management, control measures, the transmission of personal data, and evidence of appropriate planning. These have all been implemented, with one recommendation being further developed into 2026.”
O’Callaghan blamed the “surge in demand” for the fact that “today’s standards of pre-contract assessments and negotiations did not apply across all accommodation sourcing in the 2022 to 2024 period.”
He went on to state that “Any of the properties examined in this audit, and who remain within the IPAS accommodation system, have subsequently provided either evidence of ownership, or evidence of authority to offer the property to the Department, such as a lease agreement. The Department checks properties against the Tailte Éireann data base to confirm details of land registration.”
As Gript readers, local residents and even elected Councillors will know, the details of ownership of both the contracted land and the beneficial ownership of the companies that have been awarded the contracts is often impossible to discover even through extensive checks of all available property and company records.
The Minister refers to Tailte Éireann but it is often the case that where a property has been bought for the purposes of being used as asylum accommodation that the publicly available records do not show who the new owner is.
In the case of the contracting companies, the search often ends in a dead end as many of them are registered in the Isle of Man, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and other places where the details of beneficial ownership can be withheld.
At the end of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report there is a detailed table which provides a breakdown of the level of compliance met by all of the 20 centres that were inspected.
A note to the finding on the lack of planning permission states that compliance would require “evidence of application for change of use as emergency accommodation has been made to the relevant local authority and received by the IPAS.”
And yet we are regularly told that there is nothing amiss with the planning/exemption process despite that fact that Gript and others including Westmeath County Council as well as other individual Councillors and the successful applicants in the Crooksling case have uncovered dozens of instances of planning irregularities – and have been told we were wrong or did not understand the system.
In response to the Minister’s reply, Carol Nolan said that “Our politics has been convulsed for weeks by the Bike Shed controversy, but yet here we are now, in a situation immeasurably more serious and I will be stunned if this receives even a tenth of the attention.
“This is not just some oversight in due diligence that can be explained away by the so-called IPAS accommodation emergency. I, and a vanishingly small number of others, particularly Gript Media, have been warning about the systematic profiteering. We were ridiculed and attacked.”
“This latest admission is proof of the cowardice of a political class that turned its face away from profound financial mismanagement because it was terrified of taking measures to stop the problem at source.”