Local Authority: Kildare County Council
Issue: Property transaction
A councillor has called for an independent inquiry into a property transaction in which Kildare County Council agreed to sell a parcel of land for €100,000 to a private developer in 2020.
The councillor, Fiona McLoughlin Healy (Independent), wants the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to examine the transaction to see if the land was undervalued.
But her calls for an independent inquiry have come to nothing – because a piece of legislation that would have enabled such an inquiry, which was passed by the Oireachtas over 20 years ago, has never been enacted.
Cllr McLoughlin Healy recently asked Peter Burke, the Minister of State with responsibility for Local Government and Planning, if he would enact the piece of legislation, which has been sitting idle on the statute books for more than 20 years.
All that is required to enact the legislation is a stoke of a Ministerial pen – but Mr Burke has confirmed that there are no current plans to do so.
Councils must obtain the approval of their elected councillors before selling council-owned land. But when Cllr McLoughlin Healy began to examine the sale, involving three-quarters of an acre outside Newbridge, she had reservations.
The council had planned to build social housing on the site.
The land is what is known as a "ransom strip", which is a piece of land necessary to access an adjacent site being developed.
According to the council, it was prohibited from demanding a premium price for a ransom strip – because that would contravene its development plan – which said ransom strips could not be created to inhibit development.
This means that the ransom value of the strip was removed from the valuation, so councillors were asked to approve the sale for €100,000.
This is a fraction of the valuation Cllr McLoughlin Healy sourced from another professional, who valued the land at more than €1m, where the ransom strip element was incorporated into its value.
Cllr McLoughlin Healy had other concerns about how the land sale was handled and began to ask questions and wanted an inquiry into the transaction.
Section 212 of the Local Government Act, 2001 provides for such an inquiry.
In the wake of the tribunals of the 1990s, the Act introduced the idea of a "public local inquiry" – run by an inspector appointed by the minister in charge of local government.
But the councillor later discovered that even though the Local Government Act was signed into law in 2001, section 212 had never been "commenced" – the final stage of introducing legislation at which point the law finally comes into effect.
"This is the 2001 Act, and successive ministers have failed to give effect to section 212," she told RTÉ Investigates.
"It was the solution I needed, certainly in the situation, I found myself in. It's not my job to be an investigator. I needed someone else to take this on."
Cllr McLoughlin Healy then asked the Minister of State Peter Burke if he planned to commence the section.
"He advised me that he hadn't and that the Programme for Government was how he was going to bring accountability to local authorities," she said.
"You have to ask the question, why," she said.
"And what a solution it would be to all of the investigations going on around the country that are not completed or completed and sitting on ministers' desks."
The department told RTÉ Investigates that this section was not commenced due to concerns about costs, potential court challenges and the prospect that it may lead to a minister removing councillors from office if they did not perform effectively.
