Irish Water to hire more consultants

Irish Water will continue to spend millions of euro hiring outside consultants to investigate the status and design of its engineering infrastructure despite the political and public uproar caused by the revelation that €50m has already been spent on consultancies.

The controversy is expected to come before Cabinet today when ministers will consider bringing the agency under the Freedom of Information Act, which it had not planned on doing until next year.

As the company’s managing director John Tierney today prepares to be grilled by two Oireachtas committees in as many days, a spokeswoman for the state-owned Irish Water said it was normal for a company on the scale of Irish Water to continue to outsource.

It is believed after the IT and other customer support services are established by next October, Irish Water will begin assessing the operational capacity of its infrastructure, which includes up to 10,000 pumping stations and 50,000km of pipes around the country.

“We would expect that we would engage specialist advisory engineering and systems design services for the development of the capital programme,” she said.

“Irish Water will continue to outsource design and the supervision of the majority capital projects in line with current practice within local authorities.”

However, the company appears to have abandoned its intention to withhold information on the spending of the €50m due to “commercial sensitivities” after its spokeswoman said it will provide the Environment Committee with “a detailed briefing including who was paid, how much and who authorised it.”

A source said it had come to the “realisation” because committee chairman, Labour’s Michael McCarthy, had warned anything less wouldn’t satisfy him.

Yesterday the Cork South West TD said he wanted evidence produced that the company was obeying the Government’s explicit instructions to utilise existing expertise in areas such as billing, wages and IT.

One of the main reasons why Bord Gáis was chosen to set up Irish Water was the belief that it would benefit from its existing structures when it came to billing, wages, databases and infrastructure, as instructed by the Government in a 20-page report leaked last Sunday.

The company will appear before the Public Accounts Committee tomorrow.

Yesterday Social Protection Minister Joan Burton warned the company could be not be a “gold plated” operation as it had to be cost effective.