IRISH WATER STILL PAYING €1M A MONTH TO ADVISERS
Tierney told us during infamous interview ten months ago that spending on consultants would be ‘limited’
IRISH Water is spending €1m a month on consultants, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
It belies the promise of beleaguered Irish Water boss John Tierney that spending on consultants in 2014 would be very ‘limited’.
Revealing in an infamous Morning Ireland interview in January that the company had spent €50m on advice, he pledged: ‘That amount of money will not be spent
this year. Irish Water as a business will have very limited expenditure on consultants because it will have hired in the expertise.’
It was subsequently revealed that the total spend on consultants was €86m.
But in fact – according to Freedom of Information documents obtained by this newspaper – Irish Water has spent €8m in the first eight months of 2014 – including ongoing payments to RPS, the engineering consultancy that was paid €50m of public money for its work on Poolbeg incinerator project when Mr Tierney was Dublin city manager.
Two of RPS’s most senior personnel, Jerry Grant and Elizabeth Arnett, then went on to take up senior management positions within Irish Water.
The expenditure has emerged as the MoS can reveal:
Four out of five people working for Irish Water earn more than €50,000 a year – well above the national average – and 30 earn more than €100,000.
The brother of mystery Irish water director Coleman ‘Frankie’ Sheehy was a prominent guest at Enda Kenny’s official Mayo homecoming as Taoiseach in 2011.
The coalition partners are set to negotiate a deal this week on a Irish Water package, and are considering putting a charge on the property of those who don’t pay their water bills.
Thirty earn more than €100,000 a year
The FoI documents show that of the €7.677m already spent up to August, one company alone has received €4.3m in fees in 2014. Accenture Ireland is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the set-up along with IBM, Ernst & Young and KMPG as well as RPS.
This year, RPS has completed at least seven projects for Irish Water, earning the company €50,704. It will receive €262,000 in total from Irish Water in consultancy fees. RPS failed to respond to our calls this week.
Irish Water confirmed this week that its consultancy spend is not over. Of the €86m spend on consultants, contractors and legal advice as part of an overall €180m start-up budget, IBM will receive €44.8m, Accenture €17.2m, Ernst & Young €4.6m and KPMG €2.2m.
Another €13.3m will go to 18 other contractors procured ‘ to support the work’ of the major providers.
Irish Water will pay nearly €4m for legal services – €970,000 with McCann Fitzgerald and €2.9m with A&L Goodbody.
Former environment minister Phil Hogan signed off on the €180m budget in September 2012. However the public did not learn of the huge costs until Mr Tierney let the figures slip in an interview with RTÉ’s Seán O’Rourke in January.
Meanwhile, other FoI documents show that even before bonuses – which range up to 19% across the company – are applied, 400 of the company’s 530 employees earn more than €50,000, well above the average industrial wage of €43,000.
Thirty of them earn more than €100,000 – the same number that are entitled to at least a 15% performance related bonus, with an extra 4% bonus at the discretion of the board. Mr Tierney, who recently said he has ‘the hardest job there ever was’, earns €200,000 per annum, before bonuses and expenses.
Twenty seven senior managers are also entitled to €10,500 a year for using their cars on the job.
The revelations come as fresh light has been shed on the Fine Gael background of Andrew Sheehy, a Fine Gael donor whose brother Coleman ‘Frankie’ Sheehy is a director of Irish Water. His appointment has been the subject of public controversy due to his sparse profile on Irish Water’s website and its refusal to answer questions about the process of his appointment.
The MoS has uncovered pictures that show Andrew attended the 2011 Mayo homecoming of Mr Kenny in the company of Mr Kenny’s friend and Fine Gael activist Frank Quilter – and was given a prominent place on the stage at the event beside min- isters like Phil Hogan.
After last week’s mass protests against water charges, Government ministers said they had been studying a scheme in which those property owners who refused to pay water