The former president of the University of Limerick (UL) is on a year’s sabbatical on a salary of €175,000, after taking over a professorship for which there is no course currently in place.
A meeting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) also heard UL chief commercial officer Andrew Flaherty, one of the chief sponsors of the €11m acquisition of 20 houses for student accommodation in August 2022, has been placed on leave on full pay by the university pending a disciplinary process into that transaction.
The purchase of the houses, located at Rhebogue in Limerick city, has likewise been referred to An Garda Síochána for investigation.
UL chancellor Brigid Laffan told the committee on Thursday that Professor Kerstin Mey — who resigned as president of UL last June following an extended period of sick leave in the wake of the €5m overspend on Rhebogue being publicly revealed — is to be paid “at the top end of the scale” in her new role as professor of visual culture.
She said Prof Mey was currently on a 12-month sabbatical, some of which will be spent outside Ireland, to “kickstart” her academic career, a “normal” move for a senior executive re-entering academia.
UL provost Professor Shane Kilcommins acknowledged it was “correct” there was currently no course for Prof Mey to teach, as UL does not currently teach visual culture.
Prof Laffan said Prof Mey’s new role had been agreed upon following “a process of mediation involving legal advice on both sides”.
“This is a matter of judgment,” she said, adding “there are no ideal outcomes” for any university which finds itself in the situation which UL is currently in.
Asked whether or not Mr Flaherty and the chief financial and performance officer Gary Butler had given “misleading” information to the university when the Rhebogue transaction was brought to UL’s executive for approval, corporate secretary John Kelly said: “I suppose it was.
“Some of the information was empirically factually inaccurate,” he said.
UL has seen a number of governance issues, which came to a head when the Rhebogue transaction was made public last March.
Between that purchase and the acquisition of the former Dunnes Stores building in Limerick city in 2019, the institution has incurred impairment charges of more than €8m in just three years.
UL is currently subject to a Section 64 probe of heightened scrutiny from the Higher Education Authority (HEA), one which is expected to take up to five years to complete. It was described by HEA chief Alan Wall as “probably the deepest dive into a university in the history of the State”.
The PAC heard the university had received five protected disclosures in the last year alone, an “exceptionally high” figure for a third-level institution, according to Mr Kelly.
The meeting also heard a project to overhaul the student portal at UL, which documents students’ grades, has been “paused”, after close to €10m had been spent on it due to concerns as to the direction of the project.
Regarding the project, which had been due to go live this academic year, Prof Kilcommins said he had made the decision to “pause” the process as “we need to look at it to make sure the best decision is made for the university”.
He denied, however, the final cost of the project could total between €20m and €30m, saying the total was “not anticipated” to run that high.
