A COMMUNITY enterprise park which has received €1.8m in public funding is to be audited by a state agency after it sent directors and their spouses on five foreign “study” trips.
Wicklow Enterprise Park (WEP), which provides cheap rental premises to small businesses in Wicklow town, paid for board members, their spouses, and in some cases children, to travel to Florida on three occasions and the German town of Wurzburg twice between 2005 and 2009.
Pobal, a state agency which supports community development, gave the firm €137,338 in 2006 and €147,247 in 2007 under an employment grant scheme. It plans to audit WEP because of the “serious nature” of the travel details. The inquiry will only examine how money provided by Pobal was spent.
Documents seen by The Sunday Times show that the chairman Blaise Treacy, a former county manager in Wicklow, and the director Eddie Sheehy, the current county manager, both took their wives to Orlando, Florida as part of ain October 2006.
Eight other people, including directors, staff members, spouses and children, also travelled on the US trip, which was paid for in full by the company.
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Wicklow county council recently asked Treacy to attend a meeting to explain concerns raised by Irene Winters, a Fine Gael councillor, over the company’s foreign travel. Treacy did not attend, but Winters said she would put down a motion requesting he attend another meeting.
According to its website, which was recently taken down, WEP holds “charitable status” and is run on a not-for-profit basis. It employs five people, and generates income from rent charged to tenants, but has also received significant state backing since it began work in 1995. Directors work voluntarily.
Between 1995 and 2000, Enterprise Ireland and the Wicklow County Enterprise Board handed over a combined €1m in capital grants for building works. Fas, the state training agency, gave the company employment grants between 2002 and 2005 of about €75,000-€100,000 annually.
Treacy insisted WEP is a private company. He said 700 jobs had been created by the firm. Winters, who disputes the company’s claim that it is private, says it has lost sight of its original goal of providing employment. “I can’t understand why they went on all these trips,” she said. “They have been of no benefit to the local community. I can understand perhaps a director going, but not a whole party of them. That is just over the top.”
Treacy said that Pobal funding had been subject to an audit in 2007 which found no irregularities.
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He said the travel was required to “replicate the success”of counterpart companies abroad. “These were working trips and the research has greatly assisted the day-to-day management and long-term planning of the centre,” he said.