Irish Water paid €3.7m to consultants over six months

Irish Water paid out more than €3.7 million in fees to external consultants to provide it with expert services between March and August this year, newly released figures show.

The payments related mainly to legal, audit, information technology and financial services as part of its ongoing operations.

The figures, which were released to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act, show about 50 payments were made to the legal firm A&L Goodbody.

The total payments to the company over the period amounted to €740,000.

The largest amounts were for the provision of legal services and for assistance in the establishment of Irish Water’s managed services contract.

Another major legal firm, McCann Fitzgerald, received €217,000 while Arthur Cox and Co was paid €130,000 in fees during the period. Ernst and Young Ireland was paid more than €470,000, while accounting and consultancy firm KPMG got about €120,000. Tynemarch Systems received nearly €200,000 for software and engineering consultancy.

The Irish Water figures show that ICS Consulting received nearly €200,000 for advice on price control while ELM Consulting and Solutions received about €115,000 between March and August this year.

Third-party expertise

A spokeswoman for the utility said, “Irish Water is a large public utility with a significant customer, contract and asset base, and therefore it regularly requires third-party legal expertise to advise us or to act on our behalf in carrying out our normal business . . .

“We operate hundreds of contracts and at any time may require legal advice on issues ranging from land acquisition to asset transfer to CPOs to property leases to environmental issues or litigation.”

The company said the process used by Irish Water in acquiring goods and services at competitive prices “meets all best-practice standards as regards to public sector tendering”.

Meanwhile, a new report by think tank Publicpolicy.ie says abolishing Irish Water would be a significant mistake and would represent a serious setback for decent water services in Ireland.

The think tank, funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, acknowledged the manner in which Irish Water was set up, and its track record, left a lot to be desired.

However it warned that returning responsibility for water and sewage services to local authorities, as Fianna Fáil has argued, would be a big mistake.

“To return the provision of water services to 31 local authorities who have a number of other priorities would seem to qualify for Einstein’s definition of insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’.”

Publicpolicy.ie is chaired by Prof Frank Convery, who is also chairman of UCD’s Earth Institute. Its director is Donal de Buitléir.

Underinvestment

The report explicitly accepts Ireland’s water industry is a “mess” through years of underinvestment and poor operations. It notes that at the start of 2015, 940,000 people were at risk of drinking contaminated water, more than 23,000 people were on boil notices, costs were double the UK average, leaks amounted to 49 per cent and Dublin’s spare capacity was only 2 per cent.

It has argued that despite its problems, Irish Water has overseen marked improvements, namely that 20,000 people have been removed from boil notices and spare capacity in Dublin has been quadrupled to 8 per cent.

The report is also critical of the decision to lower charges while not linking charges to consumption.