Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

Fine Gael TD’s Tech Firm Received Almost €5,000,000 in Public Contracts Over Ten Years

Zing Technology, a firm co-founded by Fine Gael TD Naoise Ó Muirí in 2007, has received public contracts worth almost €5,000,000 over the last ten years, according to records obtained from various bodies under the Freedom of Information Act 2014.

Naoise Ó Muirí has represented Dublin Bay North since the last election, having previously served twenty years as a councillor in Clontarf. He is a former Lord Mayor of Dublin, and now serves as chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy.

Ó Muirí co-founded Zing in 2007 and he remains managing director. He is the majority owner of the firm, with 79% of its shares.

He declared ongoing contracts between Zing Technology and four public bodies on the Dáil Register of Members’ Interests.

The company also has an ongoing contract with the Royal Irish Academy of Music, which is not a public body under the Ethics in Public Office Act, but is under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to its website, Zing “helps companies maintain and improve unsupported software applications” and specialises in “financial services and government agencies”. It lists Mazars, DekaBank, Zurich, AXA, Cigna, Brink’s and G4S among its corporate clients.

The four ongoing contracts declared by Ó Muirí are with Bord Bia, the Marine Institute, Táilte Éireann and the Valuation Tribunal. The total value of each contract to date varies from just under €100,000 over eight years with the Valuation Tribunal to over €2,000,000 over four years with the Marine Institute.

The contract with the Royal Irish Academy of Music was signed in 2018 “for the design, development, implementation and support of online applications services and platform migration with support and maintenance of RIAM legacy systems”.

An extension was agreed in 2020 “for the continuation of additional enhancements and support to the platform”. The total value of the contract to date is €399,416.

Prior clients during the ten-year period covered by the FOIs (2015-present) include Pobal and An Bord Pleanála, whose contracts terms were 2015-2020 and 2020-2021 respectively. Zing was also contracted by Fáilte Ireland from 2009 to 2012.

As a county councillor, Ó Muirí was only required to disclose contracts with local authorities, and it is unclear if Zing has received contracts from any other public bodies since 2007.

Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

Mattie McGrath’s €2000 Snow Job

I’ve received a number of tips and queries from people hoping I could investigate a matter of interest to them since I decided to pursue journalism as a vocation. I have been asked to look into everything from organised criminal gangs to the ticketing practices of a particular traffic warden (neither of which took my fancy), but more people have asked me to pursue one question than any other.

How much did Mattie McGrath’s plant hire firm receive for clearing snow in January this year?

It took a couple of months, plus a tenner for an appeal, but I can can now say on the foot of an FOI request that E&M McGrath Plant Hire Ltd. received €2,006 from Clonmel Borough District for snow clearance in January.

E&M McGrath also subcontracted snow clearance in Tipperary-Cahir-Cashel Municipal District to another firm, but as E&M McGrath received no moneys from that district, I presume the full benefit of the contract was received by the other firm, and so does not pertain to the question at hand.

The reason I received so many queries about this is that many people in Tipp have been under the impression that Deputy McGrath’s plant hire firm engaged in snow clearance during the severe weather in January on a purely voluntary basis, at his expense, when his company was in fact engaged and paid to do so under existing contracts with the council.

Of course, Deputy McGrath has never publicly claimed otherwise, though he was liable to give the false impression credence with Facebook posts stating he was “out and about assisting the public together with our machinery staff” without clarifying his firm was being paid to do so by the council.

Or, for that matter, by parking the notorious “Mattie van”, emblazoned with his own face, next to crews undertaking work.

All of which might have stayed mere scuttlebutt had Deputy McGrath not gone on Tipp FM (06/01/25 from 41:30 to 49:41) to lambast Tipperary County Council, and a particular civil servant, by name, for their response to the extreme weather without disclosing his business’s involvement in that very response, all the while peppering his remarks with references to his own (company’s) efforts to proactively offer assistance.

I have no reason to doubt Deputy McGrath offered assistance above and beyond what his firm was contracted to do, but a calculated lack of clarity about what was voluntary and what was contracted allowed him to effectively claim credit for some portion of the council’s own efforts even as he criticised them.

To say this ruffled a few feathers would be to put it mildly: the comments were raised at the next council meeting and county councillors subsequently requested and received a list of all contractors engaged for snow clearance, though it inadvertently included four firms that were only engaged for cleanup after Storm Eowyn.

That list – which included E&M McGrath Plant Hire – eventually made its way into my hands just in time for me to appeal an FOI request regarding contractors engaged to clear snow that hadn’t included E&M McGrath at all due to an error.

Three mistakes were discovered on review, along with the mistaken inclusion of the Storm Eowyn contractors in the list supplied to councillors. They were all clearly the result of simple human error in the process of compiling information from the various district offices, and I do not believe anything was deliberately withheld from me. I just felt it worthwhile to recap the process by way of expaining why it took until May to publish this story.

I also feel it’s worthwhile to give some context and scale to the amount Deputy McGrath’s firm received.

First, I would note the amounts paid to various firms for snow clearance in Tipp range from as low as €898.65 to as high as €12,300. Among the twenty firms so contracted, the €2,006 received by E&M McGrath is clustered at the low end of the scale with the majority of firms.

It represents just 2.8% of the €69,715.03 paid by Tipp County Council to private contractors for snow clearance in Tipp in January, itself but a drop in the over €1,000,000 spent by the council in the course of the response.

Second, I would note that €2,006 represents a very small percentage of the €865,390.19 that E&M McGrath has been paid for plant hire by the same council over the last two years (March 2023 to February 2025), according to information released on foot of a separate FOI request and subsequently shared with me.

Among the thirty-one firms so contracted, whose payments begin from as low as €490.89, E&M McGrath’s €865,390.19 ranks in the top three, in a distant second to the most highly-paid firm at €2,287,692.90, but well ahead of the €480,127 received by the firm in third place.

It represents around 13.5% of the €6,386,719.94 spent on plant hire by Tipp County Council in that two-year period.

Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

The TDs Who Profit From Irish Water

The plant hire firms of TDs Mattie McGrath and Danny Healy-Rae have each received millions in contracts from Uisce Éireann since the state-owned utility (then called Irish Water) began managing Ireland’s national water infrastructure in 2015.

E&M McGrath Plant Hire, based in Newcastle, Co. Tipperary, and Healy-Rae Plant Hire, based in Kilgarvan, Co. Kerry, received contracts worth €2.2 million and €25.7 million respectively from 2015 to 2024, according to information released under the Freedom of Information Act 2014.

While Deputy McGrath was initially supportive of Irish Water in 2014, urging compliance with water charges in an interview with Tipp FM, he has since become a critic, particularly in regard to persistent water supply issues in South Tipperary. He accused Uisce Éireann of “vandalising” Clonmel’s water supply in February of this year.

Nevertheless, his firm, which is run by his son Edmund, was engaged by Uisce Éireann under a plant hire framework established by the Local Authorities Group and used by all 31 Irish local authorities, as well as Uisce Éireann. The firm has received more than €200,000 per year from Uisce Éireann in each year of its operation except 2016 and 2020.

2015€225,248
2016€149,106
2017€214,935
2018€202,706
2019€202,430
2020€172,988
2021€269,803
2022€261,339
2023€214,455
2024€292,879

Healy-Rae Plant Hire was engaged under Uisce Éireann’s national Repair and Maintenance Framework, and has received more than €2 million per year since 2018, peaking at over €5 million in 2023.

2015€306,185
2016€494,665
2017€1,435,263
2018€2,651,645
2019€2,719,472
2020€2,091,596
2021€4,697,300
2022€3,520,405
2023€5,150,671
2024€2,674,234

Deputy Healy-Rae was a director of the firm throughout his first seven years as a TD, but gradually transfered ownership to his sons from November 2023 to March 2024.

He received significant criticism in 2016 for contracting with Irish Water after campaigning against it as a councillor, which his brother and fellow TD Michael defended at the time as a continuation of prior contracts with Kerry County Council.

However, while Deputy McGrath’s firm was engaged under such contracts, Deputy Healy-Rae’s firm contracted directly with Uisce Éireann.

In its decision on the FOI request, Uisce Éireann stated that “the process Irish Water uses in acquiring goods and services at competitive prices meets all best practice standards as regards to public sector tendering”.

Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

An Open Letter to Mattie McGrath

DEPUTY MCGRATH,

I am writing to you to publicly request that you reply to multiple requests for comment I have sent you over the last six months, primarily but not exclusively regarding your involvement with anti-refugee campaigns in Tipperary. When I first contacted you in April, you did initially give me a couple of responses to some of my questions.

You have since refused to reply to any of my emails requesting comment on anything, and most recently, you blocked me from your Facebook page and deleted comments challenging you on your refusal to answer my questions. You haven’t given me the courtesy of a simple “no comment”. You have stonewalled my efforts to get your side of the story on public matters involving you.

You are an elected representative of the people of Tipperary, seeking re-election in the coming election as a TD for Tipp South. You are entrusted with the public duty to be our voice in the Dáil and you are asking voters to trust you to represent us again. I believe that as a journalist and a constituent, I am entitled to put questions to you, however difficult, and receive an answer. It is the least that transparency requires of you. The questions I have put to you are all on matters of public interest, and since you refuse to answer them privately, I am now putting them to you publicly.

I once again request comment on the following matters:

Continue reading “An Open Letter to Mattie McGrath” →
Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

Independent Councillor John O’Heney Bought Fine Gael Memberships in Effort to Win Party Selection

Update (24/11/24): John O’Heney denied this story when questioned about it during a candidate debate on Tipp Mid-West Radio (at around 19:45) and called this article a political attack by Sinn Féin. After he challenged my credibility, I updated this story with links to the recordings I used as my source. I am not nor have I ever been a member of any party, unlike Cllr. O’Heney, and if I was, it wouldn’t be Sinn Féin.

A local councillor and general election candidate in Tipp South bought Fine Gael memberships for friends and acquaintances so they could vote for him in a selection convention. Cllr. John O’Heney, a former teacher from Lattin, topped the poll as an independent in Cashel-Tipperary LEA earlier this year in his first bid for public office.

However, in a recording obtained by this reporter, O’Heney asks the recipient if they would be interested in “masquerading” as a member of Fine Gael for a couple of years in order to vote for him to be one of the party’s council candidates in the future. It is one of two voicemails or voice notes left by O’Heney that have circulated privately on social media in Tipp since before the local elections.

In the first recording (available to listen here), which I understand to date from 2022, O’Heney tells the recipient he may run for council in two years’ time and says that he’s “half-thinking of running, if I was running…as an independent” but that if that “didn’t work out”, he would “probably have to run under Fine Gael” as that’s his family background and he’d “have a little bit of support with them”.

He goes on to ask the recipient if they would allow O’Heney to sign them up as members of Fine Gael and pay their membership fee so they could vote for him at a future selection:

“I was just wondering if there’s any possibility that I could sign you up to be a member of Fine Gael this summer and next summer, so that you could possibly vote for me in that selection convention. […] You just go down and tick my name on a box, if I get enough ticks, I can run in the local elections. That’s basically it, it’s very simple.

But I’d pay the membership, the membership is twenty euros.”

He then tells the recipient if they’re interested to “send me on your name and address, and any of your family’s name and addresses that might be interested in just masquerading for two years”.

When I called Cllr. O’Heney, he stated the recordings were five years old and the matter had been “settled”, then ended the call. He did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Ireland has fixed terms of five years for local elections, so five years ago there was no local election in two years’ time. The recordings can only have been made in 2022 or 2017, two years before the 2024 and 2019 local elections respectively.

In the second recording (available to listen here), O’Heney tells the recipient to claim they reimbursed him the membership fee if questioned by Fine Gael headquarters or anyone else, and states that he “signed up about twenty people today using the same bank card and it may or may not look a little bit suspicious”.

He ultimately announced his independent candidacy in October 2023, some weeks before the selection for Cashel-Tipp LEA candidates on the 4th of December in Golden.

He ran a campaign primarily focused on his local activism and community work, promising to be “a strong voice for West Tipperary”. Since April last year, he has organised a “Sightsaver Bus” to take patients from Tipp to Belfast for medical procedures through the Northern Ireland Planned Healthcare Scheme.

It is unclear if or when he formally ceased his membership of Fine Gael. He announced he would contest the general election in September, less than three months after he was elected to council.

Earlier this year, I reported that O’Heney, in his capacity as a Commissioner for Oaths, witnessed hundreds of affidavits for the sham injunction pursued by the “No to Dundrum” campaign in an attempt to obstruct the accommodation of asylum seekers at Dundrum House Hotel. The scheme was the brainchild of Patrick McGreal, a vegetable farmer and conspiracy theorist from Westmeath, who convinced members of the anti-refugee group to take a case to the High Court based on his own bespoke brand of legal nonsense, though it was McGreal himself who made the application.

The application was refused by Justice David Holland, who was critical of affidavits featuring racist claims, including that asylum seekers were more likely to be burglars than hotel guests or Ukrainian refugees.

Neither O’Heney nor his general election opponent Mattie McGrath, who spent two days in the High Court supporting the injunction effort, responded to multiple requests for comment on that story.