A very different version of events

ANALYSIS:Greg Craig has given his side of the story at Fás for the first time

INTERNAL AUDIT Report, Corporate Affairs, INV 137 is a 68-page document that draws a picture of a public official spending taxpayers' money with a terrifying lack of care.

It reports multiple breaches of State procurement rules in relation to large contracts with advertising firms and others, and creates the impression that largesse was being distributed by a free-standing public official with a multi-million euro budget.

The report, in time, made its way to the office of the Comptroller Auditor General, and the CAG in turn alluded to some of the INV 137 material in a special report outlining wastage of public funds by a range of bodies, including Fás.

The Dáil Public Accounts Committee decided to look into the matter. The media sought copies of the INV 137 report under the Freedom of Information Act and disclosed aspects of its findings to the public. In the ensuing media and political frenzy the former director general of Fás, Rody Molloy, has resigned, the board of Fás may yet fall, and the future of Fás as presently constituted is in question.

But what if INV 137 is a flawed report that fails to put matters in their proper context and comes to incorrect conclusions? That in essence is the opinion of Greg Craig, the official who had charge of the Fás corporate affairs budget for the period covered by the report. He has been on sick leave since June, and has not commented on the controversy at Fás, up to now.

At the end of the 1990s Ireland reached de facto full employment and multinationals that had set up here were finding it difficult to get the workers they needed. They complained to the IDA, which in turn spoke with the then Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Harney. She got onto Fás and it, an employment authority with a huge budget in a country that suddenly had little or no unemployment, had a purpose again. A series of job fairs were run in cities around Europe as well as in South Africa and North America. Fás had its own jobs website but the level of demand being created by the jobs fairs was causing the system to crash. Furthermore, the Fás IT department was very much a nine to five, five-day week operation. So Craig decided to set up a new website, outside the organisation, using a "webfarm" that was managed around the clock.

The Fás annual report for 2000 dealt with this recruitment drive abroad. "The creation of a dedicated Jobs Ireland website . . . is the other principal component of the Jobs Ireland Programme. This is an innovative approach to the problem of locating suitable overseas workers . . . The success of the website to date is reflected by the fact that the site has received over three million hits and one million page impressions per month. Approximately 80,000 foreign-based job-seekers have registered their CVs on the website."

The result was "a massive increase" in the number of non-EU workers coming to Ireland, the report said. It was Rody Molloy's first annual report as director general, and the website received lavish praise.

Mary Harney was also impressed and even gave consideration to using the website to process the work permits now needed for all these foreign workers. Fás looked at setting up the website as a commercial subsidiary, and a business plan was forwarded to Molloy. Everyone was delighted.

But that's not the picture you get from INV 137. It paints a picture of an unsupervised public servant casually setting up an unnecessary website at a cost to the taxpayer of €1.7 million. Furthermore Molloy, during his appearance before the PAC in October, gave the impression he had little to do with the website other than to close it down.

"It was an issue of concern to me when I came into the organisation, or shortly after, that there were two websites which, it could be argued, were doing similar activity," he told the deputies on the committee. "I ordered the closedown of the external website."

According to Craig, he was working under great pressure and made repeated and unsuccessful requests for a finance manager to be assigned to his office. His superiors (Molloy and Gerry Pyke, both now retired) knew what he was doing with his budget, and he believed he had their blessing.

That is not what it reads like in INV 137, and nor is it the picture being painted by the evidence being heard by the PAC. Maybe the committee should call Craig and hear his side of the story.