Brussels investigates complaint over control of Leader funds in Cork

The European Commission is investigating a complaint that Cork County Council made offers of illegal State aid to win control of the administration of local Leader funds.

The complaint to Brussels was made by the West Cork Development Partnership, which recently lost its appeal against a decision to refuse it permission to run the Leader programme in west Cork.

The programme, financed by the EU, will bring €250 million worth of grant aid to rural Ireland from 2014-2020, with Cork, Galway and Donegal due to win the largest shares.

Tempers have frayed after a decision by the Government to award control of most of the Leader programmes to local authorities, rather than locally created development groups.

Unhappy about losing out, the West Cork Development Partnership alleges that the county council offered a top-up fund of €3.5 million to supplement Leader funds in north, south and west Cork.

The impact of the local authority’s top-up was to lure other partnerships under the council’s wing, thus giving it an unfair advantage through a promise of State aid, the development partnership claims.

In a letter sent to the partnership last week, the commission’s directorate-general for Agriculture and Rural Development said it would investigate.

Ian Dempsey, chief executive of the West Cork Development Partnership, said the loss of the Leader contract was particularly galling given that the EU had previously praised its stewardship as “an exemplar”.

In a letter to the Southern Star this week, county council head Tim Lucey said the competition rules had been vetted by an independent third party, which had decided in its favour.

Mr Dempsey told the paper that the complaint to Brussels will surprise “few people” – “a deeply flawed and suspect process” had yielded “a deeply flawed and suspect outcome”.