COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC ACCOUNTS:BUILDING CONSULTANCY firm KMCS was awarded contracts worth more than €3 million on 22 projects with the Irish Prison Service without any tendering process, a Dáil committee was told yesterday.

Director general of the Irish Prison Service Brian Purcell told the Dáil Committee on Public Accounts there was no tender process because the prison service had engaged the company before and was satisfied with the quality of its work.

The committee was examining the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on procurement in the Prison Service and other accounts at the Department of Justice.

KMCS was engaged to advise the Prison Service on a tender process for a construction framework agreement in 2004. The firm was subsequently appointed as project managers and quantity surveyors for 22 of the 96 projects undertaken under the framework agreement.

Mr Purcell said KMCS had extensive knowledge of working in a prison setting and there were not many other companies with its knowledge. “In hindsight we should have gone to tender with them,” he said.

Chairman of the committee, Fine Gael TD Bernard Allen, asked if the lack of tender process had breached EU law.

Dermot Quigley, principal officer at the national public procurement policy unit in the Department of Finance said it was “rather unusual” for no tender competition to have taken place. “On a prima facie basis questions would have to be raised,” he said.

Department of Justice secretary general Seán Aylward said there had been an instruction at the time from the Department of Finance to speed up building work. His department was told it could go out and directly negotiate with companies.

There were lessons to be drawn from this, he said, but “one lesson that should not be drawn was that people had behaved dishonourably”.

Fianna Fáil TD Michael McGrath raised the cost of accommodation for asylum seekers in 2008, which was €91.5 million, and asked why it was so high given that the number of people looking for asylum had reduced.

Mr Aylward said the flow of applicants had fallen, but the stock of people had continued to build up as fresh asylum seekers came into the process and others appealed, had judicial reviews and sought humanitarian leave to remain. “That leaves the stock where it is at,” he said.

Some 1,500 of the 7,000 people in asylum accommodation had been there more than three years “simply because repeatedly, over and over again they have invoked new avenues of appeal”, he said.

“What we have is a process being strung out,” he said.

New legislation currently before the Oireachtas would tighten up the situation and would require people who apply for asylum to “put everything up on the table immediately”, Mr Aylward added.

The committee was also told that Cork prison had a bed capacity of 272, but 309 people were currently accommodated there.

Plans to develop a new prison at Kilworth on Department of Defence lands would be progressed “sooner rather than later”, Mr Purcell said.