Tom Lynch, CEO of the Property Services Regulatory Authority fails to deliver commercial leases database

Tom Lynch – pictured here – the former Principal Officer in, what was the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and who was appointed in 2006 to run, what was then the National Property Services Regulatory Authority, has failed to deliver again. We were supposed to have a register of all post-Jan 2010 commercial leases by the end of March 2013, but there is absolutely no sign of it, and a request for comment sent to the Property Services Regulatory Authority over the weekend has not been responded to. There is no message on the PSRA website indicating a delay.

The bould Thomas has a history of late delivery. In November 2011 he told the Irish Times in relation to the residential property price register that it would be online by June 2012. In the end, we got a surprisingly basic register at the end of September 2012, and people are still picking errors out of it.

The March 2013 deadline for fulfilling what is another Troika demand to make the Irish property market more transparent, had been signposted for some considerable time, and Minister for Justice and Equality Alan Shatter has been frequently asked about it in the Dail – for example here and here and here, and when most recently asked about it in the Dail, Minister Shatter indicated that we might be seeing details of up to 20,000 commercial leases.

When this Government says that it has met all the targets in the 2010 bailout agreement with the Troika, that’s not totally true; some targets were deferred  in agreement with the Troika and some were missed, like the introduction of personal insolvency legislation. So, Thomas isn’t just not delivering in his own organization but he puts in jeopardy the delivery of terms under the bailout agreement.

Developments will be monitored on here.

UPDATE: 5th April, 2013. The Property Services Regulatory Authority has responded to say the database will not be launched “until the end of May 2013”