At a recent meeting of Wicklow County Council, Green Party councillor Deirdre de Burca welcomed the proposed purchase by Wicklow County Council of a 65 acre site in Rathnew for a third level outreach college. She said saying that the proposal was “very good news” for young people in Wicklow, and for the economic life of the county generally. The Green Party councillor voted to allow the council to borrow 9 million euros to purchase half of the Clermont Convent site, while the private company Ardawn Developments plc is to buy the other half.

“This is a very innovative approach to ensuring the development of a badly-needed third level institution in County Wicklow” says de Burca. “Given the failure of the State to provide the necessary funding, the local authority has decided to be proactive and to enter into a joint arrangement with the private sector. However I am calling for a proper business plan to be drawn up as councillors have been provided with no information at all about how this joint partnership will work and yet we have voted to invest 9 million of the local authority’s money in it”.

The Green councillor has expressed concern at the County Manager’s statement that certain development lands owned by the council in the Greystones area will probably be sold in the future to pay back the 9 million borrowed. “The council has failed over the last few years to provide a recycling centre for Greystones, claiming that it hasn’t found a suitable site” she says. “And yet we now have the County Manager planning to sell the very valuable land we do own in the Greystones area when the town could use the value of these sites to fund infrastructure and new facilities”.

De Burca says that she has seen too many examples of public- private partnerships benefiting only the private sector. She has called on Wicklow County Council to secure a reasonable commercial return on the Rathnew site rather than bearing all the risk and allowing the private company to realise all the profit. She points out that there appears to be no precedent for such a public- private approach to developing a third level outreach college in Ireland and that Wicklow County Council will have to hammer out the best possible deal for itself.

“As councillors who have authorised the 9 million euros loan for the purchase of the site I think we need a proper business plan placed in front of us showing how the site can be made to realise its full economic value, how any third level college will be developed and run, the share of any profits the council will receive and so on” she says. “It’s about time that councillors started demanding value for money where the spending of taxpayers money is concerned”.

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Press Release by Deirdre