Dail committee: Senior civil servants have acknowledged there are new concerns over the security of the Government's investment in the €15 million Agricultural and Equestrian Event Centre at Punchestown racecourse.
Yesterday the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard that a new organisational structure at the racecourse, which would underpin the State's interest, had yet to be implemented.
The structure was recommended by the committee last year in a report that was highly critical of how the event centre was funded.
In early 2000 the Department of Agriculture and the then minister for finance, Mr Charlie McCreevy, sanctioned the 100 per cent funding of the centre, although there had been no detailed evaluation of the project.
Six months later he agreed to a doubling of the funding, after major cost revisions were made on the application by Punchestown, which was in his constituency.
Yesterday PAC heard that the failure to implement the new agreement had arisen due to a dispute between Kildare Hunt Club, which owns the racecourse, and Horseracing Ireland (HRI), which now runs the course and has made loans and grants of nearly €8 million to it. The course is now in profit.
Mr Philip Furlong, secretary general at the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism, told the committee there was a belief within the hunt club that leases relating to the racecourse were invalid. The club is concerned that if the leases were allowed to stand, they could lead to a major tax liability on the part of the hunt, and could lose the racecourse as a result.
Mr Furlong said the possibility of the leases being declared invalid "caused some concern to Horseracing Ireland, in terms of relying on the security they had over assets to cover the loan and the grant to Punchestown Racecourse".
He said HRI was also working on behalf of the Department of Agriculture, on similar security concerns over the event centre.
He said HRI had received an assurance from the hunt club that, irrespective of the dispute, it would stand over its commitments to Horseracing Ireland.
PAC members were critical of the lack of clarity on the State's security relating to grants and loans of €28 million to the racecourse and event centre in the last eight years, despite last year's report.