Big Phil fails to come clean as stink from fiasco escalates

Phil Hogan’s attempts to wash his hands of blame for the latest fiasco his finger prints were all over was harder to swallow than a glass of cryptosporidium-infected water.

Feck-It-Up Phil, the Minister For Mismanagement, was insisting the uproar provoked by revelations Irish Water was splurging €86m on outside consultants was nothing to do with him.

What did people expect? Hands-Off-Hogan to actually take charge of something his department was pumping the taxpayer’s treasure into?

“They wouldn’t need to set up a company if I was going to be involved in the day-to-day running of the company,” he mused.

Maybe not, but they would need to set up an emergency explosion zone nearby if he did, just so everyone was ready for the inevitable calamity that would follow his lucky touch.

“I don’t micro-manage,” he bleated.

But it would be closer to the truth to say he barely manages at all — especially if Mr Hogan thinks the €180m Irish Water start-up costs he seems to have outsourced responsibility for are in any way “micro”.

“I’m actually an ordinary human being like most people,” he felt the need to explain at one point, presumably for the benefit of those of us who might have mixed him up with some form of living deity.

Taking comfort in an inappropriate cliche, Hogan then philosophised with the thought: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” but it seems Feck-It-Up Phil can’t make a decision with shaking dread engulfing the rest of Government.

Never one to pass the buck in the face of Cabinet outrage that Irish Water contracts allowed for a boom time-style bonus scheme, Mr Hogan shrugged: “If the Department of Public Expenditure Reform want to review that that’s a matter for them,” as he refused to echo comments by colleagues that such payments would be wrong.

But maybe if the line minister — FYI: that’s you Mr Hogan — actually had a grip on the €180m extravaganza gushing out of the Irish Water taps from the beginning, the opposition (and some on his own side) would not be urging the Taoiseach to flush him down the drain now?

But Mr Kenny is unlikely to pull the plug on his best FG bud and so will let him sail away to a cushy commissioner’s job when the Brussels vacancy comes up later this year.

And after his disaster-laden reign at the environment department in Dublin, we can only marvel at the chaos he could unleash across a whole continent.

Only a few weeks old officially, it seems cash has been surging out of the new semi-State metering monopoly like murky water from a burst pipe, but don’t look to Hogan for any form of accountability.

Water, water everywhere, but Phil didn’t stop to think.