Mayo County Council will hold a special meeting at the end of February to discuss the action plan being put in place by council management following the loss of €2.1 million in Greenway funding.
At the January monthly meeting of the council, a lengthy debate took place on foot of a report on the issue provided by council management to councillors before Christmas. However, according to a number of councillors, the extensive report was lacking in some detail.
Westport based Fine Gael Cllr Peter Flynn told the meeting: "I joined the (Westport ) town council back in 1999 and I never, ever received a report without a signature at the bottom of it. There was no signature on this report, which then kind of leads me to believe, we are looking to use an individual as a scapegoat on this and senior management are not willing to stand up and take responsibility for it.
"There was critical data missing off that report; we followed up with an additional request and received some of that data and the question remains, why didn't we receive that information from the beginning?
"Why is all the financial data all blurred? Why is a number of the names of employees that worked on the project, all redacted? There is no logic to it.
“We are dealing with internal employees on internal projects and there is no GDPR reason why you would redact that information, unless you are trying to hide some information.
"I did go through some of the data over the weekend and to me, it really bears out some of the madness that went on in Mayo County Council over the last ten years.
"On one particular project in the Claremorris District, there was thousands charged to a launch event, where you had a marquee, catering, sound systems, event managers - you had senior management at this particular event, it was all charged to a capital project that hadn't even commenced.
"It just beggars belief that senior management did not ask the question, who is funding an event like this - which is purely a revenue item."
Cllr Flynn went on to say: "Through the redacted stuff, you can see there is a person who was assigned to a project in the Castlebar area and was charged to the Achill greenway project - I'm pretty sure this person would never have set foot in Achill, let alone work on the project; again it begs the question, who approved the action?
"This isn't down to the person submitting the report, this is down to the people within the organisation that took a deliberate approach to coding individual employees to projects they were clearly not working on and again, tried to hide it, with the way we got the information this week."
Cllr Flynn concluded his remarks saying: "To me there has been I won't say cover up - because it is maybe too difficult a word, but let's just say, there has been a concerted effort not to allow this information to go out into the wider public to carry out a proper enquiry into it, to put proper governance controls in place and I have to say it is really disappointing."
His party colleague, Cllr Donna Sheridan, proposed a meeting be held at the end of February on the action plan being put in place and also posed a number of questions to council management on the report, saying: "I think this is like a band aid, we need to rip it off and find out exactly what happened, how it is dealt with and a report to make sure this does not happen again, to ensure that departments, our constituents, everyone else, has faith in the council.
"The report was hugely detailed and there was a lot of information there, but there was a lot of information missing in my opinion also."
She went on to say: "I'm not particularly interested in who signed the claim forms, I'm more interested in who authorised them. We need to understand why this happened and was there a culture of what was happening." She also said: "Did the retired CE (chief executive ) authorise or direct the claims to be signed? Was, as part of the audit that we were sent, any searches conducted to see if there was any records of emails or authorisations of the claims?"
Responding to councillors' queries, Kevin Kelly, chief executive of Mayo County Council, said: "The members should be very clear, there are many references to getting to the bottom of the issue. As was outlined at the last meeting, there was monies drawn down in advance of the completion of the work in a way that was not satisfactory and shouldn't have happened and it is our intent to ensure that does not happen again.
"In terms of providing information, there has been a genuine intent to provide information to the members. Obviously, with a time when there was a lot of work on, there was a very comprehensive report compiled for the members before Christmas and on foot of requests last week additional information was supplied as requested.
"Some of that was redacted on the basis of personal information and if there is specific aspects of that that the members feel isn't personal information and needs to be acquired for a fuller understanding, then certainly that discussion can be had in respect of that.
"The intent of the approach has been to provide a very comprehensive piece of information to the members on what has happened; as the director outlined, there is a very clear focus on what we are trying to do now, firstly in the way of procedures and understanding about project management , delivery and the financial management of those projects."
