TÁNAISTE MARY Coughlan made a commitment to give the nationwide Your Country, Your Call (YCYC) competition Government funding of €300,000 even though her then department did not have the funding in its budget.
The enterprise competition was initiated by Dr Martin McAleese, husband of President Mary McAleese, with the aim of finding two projects that would create prosperity and jobs for Ireland.
Documentation from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation – where the Tánaiste was minister until March this year – says a commitment “clearly appears to have been given at political level”.
“However, no additional funding has been made available to the department to provide such support,” a briefing note to the department’s secretary general and assistant secretary says.
The documentation, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also indicates the issue was “bounced around” the department. An e-mail from a staff member at the micro-enterprise policy unit to the office of Ms Coughlan’s successor, Batt O’Keeffe, said the unit had no role in the matter. Chairman of Your Country, Your Call, Lawrence Crowley, met Ms Coughlan in September 2009.
According to a letter from Mr Crowley to the Tánaiste in January 2010, she had subsequently agreed to support the initiative. Mr Crowley later wrote to the Tánaiste asking her to forward €300,000 to the bank account of An Smaoineamh Mór Ltd, the company set up to run the competition. The department note says: “It took some time to establish precisely the nature of the commitment which the Tánaiste had given to the YCYC initiative. However, the Tánaiste advised the secretary general on 17 February that, following discussions with the Minister for Finance, €300,000 was to be provided.
“This information was conveyed by the Tánaiste on the day prior to the publication of the 2010 Revised Estimates.”
“The Department of Finance officials, with whom we were in regular contact in preparing the estimates, were unaware of the arrangement to support YCYC and, given the timing, it was not possible to have an additional €300,000 included in the department’s published estimate for 2010.” Mr O’Keeffe told Labour TD Ciarán Lynch in a response to a parliamentary question on December 1st that no funding had yet been paid.
The department did not respond to questions sent by The Irish Times. Separately, the Standards in Public Office Commission said yesterday it had carried out a thorough examination of two complaints about the competition and was satisfied donations given to it were neither given nor received for political purposes.