‘Irish Water should not be exempt from FoI’

Irish Water must be stripped of its veil of secrecy following controversy over €50m start-up costs paid to consultants, politicians have said.

Michael McCarthy, chairman of the Oireachtas environment committee which is set to grill the organisation’s chiefs tomorrow, insisted that Irish Water could no longer be exempt from freedom of information probes.

The move for greater transparency was backed by junior natural resources minister Fergus O’Dowd.

The minister said he expected FoI inclusion for Irish Water, which was only formally established on Jan 1, to be retrospective.

“I would expect it to be — I can’t see why it wouldn’t be. What would be the point in not having it retrospective?” he told RTÉ.

Fianna Fáil’s environment spokesman, Barry Cowen, said the Government had been forced into an embarrassing U-turn on the issue.

“We have seen Government representatives trip over themselves to suddenly demand transparency at Irish Water over the past few days.

“These are senior members of the same Government that went out of its way to cloud the establishment of Irish Water in secrecy.

“They supported the move to exempt Irish Water from FoI and from the remit of the comptroller and auditor general, they blocked my questions about the budget for consultants and they voted to guillotine the legislation before Christmas so that none of these issues could be debated,” Mr Cowen said.

Mr McCarthy insisted Irish Water chiefs would not be allowed to avoid questioning on the grounds of commercial confidentiality.

“I do hope the meeting will be full and frank — I don’t want to see any stonewalling or avoiding answering questions,” said Mr McCarthy.

The move came as it emerged a confidential document drawn-up in 2012 envisaged Irish Water using existing Bord Gáis resources regarding areas such IT, asset management, customer billing systems, and other major operations.

The report, obtained by RTÉ, did not refer to consultants, but Irish Water boss John Tierney has come under intense criticism after revealing the agency spent €50m of taxpayers’ money on such external advice while setting up the body.