Inland Fisheries Ireland admits to 'ongoing and uphill struggle' to win back public trust

IFI is facing a Workplace Relations Commission case brought by former chief executive Francis O’Donnell (pictured), who alleges he was blackmailed by a sitting senator in relation to his suspension in 2002 of the brother of IFI’s former chair, Fintan Gorman.

Inland Fisheries Ireland says it is in an “ongoing and uphill struggle” to win back the public trust as a result of the “aftershocks” of a series of damaging scandals.

The agency will appear before the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday for the second time in four months after the PAC raised concerns over the standard of information delivered to it at its previous hearing last December.

IFI chairman Tom Collins is expected to tell the committee that the organisation “has been in stormy waters for a number of years”, and that it has “not as yet fully navigated” its way out of that position.

IFI is facing a Workplace Relations Commission case brought by former chief executive Francis O’Donnell, who alleges he was blackmailed by a sitting senator in relation to his suspension in 2002 of the brother of IFI’s former chair, Fintan Gorman.

The organisation has also been hit by a series of governance problems, detailed extensively in a special report by the Comptroller and Auditor General last July. These include the fallout from an IFI vehicle crash that later emerged to involve an uninsured vehicle, as well as a string of failed prosecutions that were withdrawn when it was found the necessary powers had not been properly delegated.

These issues, along with concerns raised through protected disclosures, led the then-environment minister Eamon Ryan to dissolve the IFI board entirely in February 2023. The organisation has also been without an active chief executive since Mr O’Donnell — who left IFI last June — went on leave in March 2024.

At last December’s hearing, IFI’s deputy CEO Barry Fox initially told the committee he had no knowledge of an investigation allegedly commissioned by then-minister Eamon Ryan into the car crash. 

He later clarified that a report of that investigation had in fact been delivered to IFI in February 2025. The crash resulted in €230,000 in legal fees and repair costs for the vehicles involved.

Mr Fox said IFI disputed the report’s finding that the organisation had allowed the employee who was driving the vehicle to present inaccurate insurance documents to gardaí. However, documents released to The Currency under the Freedom of Information Act subsequently revealed that senior officials within IFI had known about that investigation since its commencement. 

That revelation lead PAC chair John Brady to announce the committee would seek to bring IFI back for a second hearing due to the “deeply concerning” discrepancies noted in the agency’s testimony last December. These include when the organisation had first become aware that the car crashed while uninsured.

Mr Collins is set to tell the committee on Thursday that the PAC meeting in December had been “a source of concern to all of us in IFI”, but since that hearing “a number of misapprehensions or misdirections on the part of some members of the committee” have emerged.

He will add that Mr Ryan did not commission an investigation, but that the report in question had been “triggered by a protected disclosure”.