Entire reform agenda depends on clarity

Establishing an entity intended to be as transformative as Irish Water was always going to be expensive.

However, even the project’s most committed champions must raise at least one eyebrow at the fact that consultants have been paid something around €50m by the semi-state during its very short life. That figure, just half of the set-up costs, is more than daunting and even if it unsurprising that consultants are involved in a development of this scale and importance, it raises all sort of questions that demand detailed, unambiguous answers. It also demands that answers are provided quickly and in a public forum. In this context, Irish Water’s promise to appear before the Dáil’s Environment Committee if asked to do so is welcome.

The need for clarification stands even if Environment Minister Phil Hogan has an NTMA report that suggests that costs are “reasonable”. It is reassuring that he, as the lead minister, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore have insisted that the entire project will be and is subject to rigorous scrutiny. That however, is not enough to close the affair; much more needs to be done, much more needs to be clarified.

That process of reassurance needs to begin immediately as there is much more at stake than the millions already identified. If it cannot be shown we are capable of completing a project as far-reaching, as complex, and as important as this without falling into the bad habits of the past, the shabby cronyism that ate away at the integrity of public life, then the hugely important reform agenda will suffer a near-fatal blow.

Of course, the subtext is obvious and all too familiar — we are again at that point where accountability and public money meet, or at least should meet. No matter how we might wish to see Irish Water as a new, untainted venture the misuse of public funds by organisations like Fás and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority — and the ludicrous, impossible staff guarantees given by Bertie Ahern when the HSE was established — make it impossible not to be suspicious. Those feelings are exacerbated because some of the consultancy firms whose fingerprints are all over our rogue banks’ recklessness and our response to their collapse are once again centre stage.

The €50m revelation raises several side issues.

All of us, including most of our elected representatives in the Oireachtas, would still be blissfully unaware of the scale of the consultants’ fees had the company’s chief executive John Tierney not volunteered the information to RTÉ’s Seán O’Rourke. This is not how information of this magnitude should reach the public domain.

The culture of secrecy that prevails at publicly owned business behemoths is not always in the public interest. EirGrid’s ongoing pylons saga and Nama’s property deals are just two examples of this. Irish Water has an opportunity to establish the kind of transparency that will strengthen its place in the communities it serves. It should take that opportunity to make a break with the worst aspects of our past.

At the end of the day, Irish Water is a quango answerable to the public through Government. At this point the priority must be establishing that public funds have been used wisely and that we can all believe that the shabby practices of the past have been consigned to history. A public already so disenchanted with too many aspects of our often dysfunctional public life can accept nothing less.