A junior Government minister has called for an independent inquiry into a land transaction which resulted in the construction of a luxury apartment complex on a section of a public park in Limerick.
The call for an inquiry by Tim O'Malley follows an allegation from a local property developer that the site at the People's Park was sold for nearly €750,000 below its market value.
The Minister of State has said that Limerick City Council's explanation for the development in the park could no longer stand up to serious scrutiny.
"I have never accepted that we can have a situation where land that was given for the use of ordinary people in the form of a public park can somehow be morphed into a block of luxury apartments," he said.
In a letter to Mr O'Malley, property developer Seán Geary alleged that a council official, Fergus Quinlivan, told him at a meeting in City Hall in 2002 that the site in which he had expressed an interest would fetch approximately €2.3 million.
Mr Geary said he was amazed when he learned that the same site was subsequently sold without going to public tender to another developer, Reidy Civil Engineering Ltd, for €1.57 million.
The developer also expressed surprise that the council did not come back to inform him that a development was going ahead on the same site.
When contacted yesterday, Mr Quinlivan said he did not recall such a meeting with Mr Geary in 2002. He added that he held discussions with many people in the course of his former employment.
He said that if he had indicated a price of €2.3 million, that it could only have been for an adjoining site, which was subsequently sold to McInerney Construction for a higher price.
Responding to Mr Quinlivan's claims, Mr Geary stressed there was "no doubt whatsoever" that the site they had discussed was the site at the People's Park site and not the adjoining one.
The developer said he was "amazed" that the retired official could not remember the meeting.
Limerick city manager Tom Mackey said he was not aware of any discussions between Mr Geary and the now-retired council official, and added that he did not see the significance of the allegations in light of Mr O'Malley's calls for an inquiry.
A senior council official said last night that there was no record on file of such a meeting between Mr Quinlivan and Mr Geary in 2002.
Reidy Civil Engineering Ltd has now completed construction of a five-storey block of 59 apartments, a mix of office and retail space and an underground car park on the park site.
The section of park where the luxury block now stands, in part, was held in trust under the terms of a 500-year lease agreed in 1877 by the Earl of Limerick, the trustees of the People's Park and Limerick Corporation.
Limerick City Council paid €75,000 to the Earl of Limerick's estate and €75,000 to the trustees of the People's Park for the freehold and leasehold respectively.
Edmund Pery, the seventh Earl of Limerick, indicated that he was misled about the development and said he would have objected if he had known more about the project.