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.

Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

The Dundrum “Injunction” is a Sham

If you have previously heard about a legal action brought in the High Court by “residents of Dundrum” in Co. Tipperary at the end of July, you probably heard the story like this. A group of outspoken residents of a small Tipperary village filed an injunction to try and stop Dundrum House, a shuttered hotel contracted to house Ukrainian refugees since 2022, from becoming a hybrid accommodation centre that also houses non-Ukrainian refugees, or “International Protection Applicants”, as the government insists on calling them. They submitted over 280 affidavits expressing their “legitimate concerns”, but the judge denied their application for an ex parte emergency injunction because they did not persuade him there was any emergency to address.

The problem is that’s not what happened, and every news outlet that’s publicised the story this way has either missed or ignored copious red flags that should have alerted to them to the real story.

No one from Dundrum filed an injunction in the High Court. A man called Patrick McGreal from Westmeath had already filed his own injunction against a statutory instrument that allows the government to build temporary accommodation for displaced persons without going through the usual planning process. He then attempted to file an ex partie emergency injunction against Dundrum House, supported by affidavits from the protesters, but without any residents of Dundrum as applicants. The Dundrum protesters – many of whom are not in fact residents of Dundrum at all – also separately tried to join McGreal’s injunction against the statutory instrument, even though it’s not clear to me the statutory instrument in question is even at issue in the case of Dundrum House.

I don’t know if those protesters even realised that’s what they were doing, because it was all the hare-brained scheme of McGreal himself, a vegetable farmer and conspiracy theorist who took the protesters for a ride by promising them a nonsense legal solution to their woes based on his own crank theories and magical thinking. He wasted their time, effort and money on a frivolous legal action that never had any chance of succeeding, and now he’s using the notoriety he’s gained from his role to raise money for further vexatious litigation.

Worse still, four elected Tipp representatives – three councillors and TD Mattie McGrath – lended this effort their official support without seeking any independent legal advice or doing any due diligence to vet Mr. McGreal’s credibility. All were asked to comment on this story, and all refused but one, who immediately changed his mind once I made the scope of the story apparent. These elected officials helped a charlatan mislead their constituents, and now they’re hiding from the responsbility.

Continue reading “The Dundrum “Injunction” is a Sham” →
Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

The Fire at Heywood Road

For my previous articles on Clonmel Concerned Residents, see here and here.

I genuinely meant it when I said I didn’t intend to write about Clonmel Concerned Residents and their campaign against housing for refugees in the town again any time soon. I won’t pretend I haven’t gotten anything from the experience of investigating and writing about this group, but I equally won’t pretend it didn’t take a toll on me. The actual footwork mostly consisted of reading posts and comments and watching videos that were alternately tedious and disgusting. I needed a break and already had one booked, a visit with friends in London, my first holiday since before the pandemic apart from a weekend sojourn to catch a Frankie Boyle show. I’d everyone in my life telling me I needed to look away for at least a few days or I’d go cracked, and for once, I listened and looked forward to unplugging and detoxing and all that good shit.

Unfortunately, the pace of events did not respect the sanctity of my travel plans. First, two core members of Clonmel Concerned Residents, Dee Dempsey and Shane Smith, announced they would be running in the local elections in Clonmel. Then, on the 13th of May, members of Clonmel Concerned Residents established a camp on the Heywood Road and began a campaign of direct action to obstruct the development of 82 modular homes intended to house currently homeless Ukrainian refugees. They had previously announced their plans to occupy the site at the 2nd of May meeting I attended, though I chose not to publicise it in my previous post for fear of giving them free advertising.

That night, I also sent my previous posts to several local media outlets, including Tipp FM. I mention Tipp FM specifically because they replied immediately the next morning, so I know for a fact they’ve had everything I’ve reported since then, and I think it’s important they not be able to plead ignorance about how extreme this group is and has been from the start. I was already fairly anxious about how fast everything was happening as I was heading off, but I was still shocked by just how quickly things escalated in the next few days. By the 17th, there had been a night-time attack on the site in which a number of construction vehicles were burnt out, along with the small plywood shelter that Clonmel Concerned Residents had built for their camp. More concerningly, security staff at the site were assaulted, with one man requiring hospitalisation. I have no evidence that Clonmel Concerned Residents were involved in this attack or a possible second incident of arson, but they celebrated it all the same and doubled down on their campaign with, at best, complete indifference to the risk of further violence.

They organised a march in Clonmel on the 25th of May that drew in cranks from the South Tipp area and beyond to swell their own very small numbers and use the turnout to create a false impression of popular local support when the reality is that there is no appetite for this kind of politics in Clonmel. I’m under no illusions about Tipp being a lefty homeland either. We have one of the most conservative electorates in the country, but it’s a very traditional, cautious kind of conservatism already well-served within the spectrum of the Irish political mainstream. Before this march, Clonmel Concerned Residents had never turned out more than 30-40 people at a single event in a town of over fifteen thousand and even with outside agitators answering their call for support, they’ve barely fielded more than a dozen people on the Heywood Road at a time. They turned out substantially fewer people at a second march over the weekend, even though the first march was rained out and the stones were splitting for the second. The truth is that even most people in Clonmel who oppose the modular homes do not support Clonmel Concerned Residents and their campaign or their tactics. They can claim to speak for the silent majority all they like, but these are not marches by or for the people of Clonmel, they are marches by and for a national far right movement actively looking for towns to turn into sites of confrontation, whether the residents like it or not, and must be understood as such.

Events in Clonmel are now being reported on in both the national press and online outlets of the far right, with the former providing scant information and little context, while the latter are actively propagandising on behalf of Clonmel Concerned Residents, presenting them as the vanguard of a townwide rebellion instead of a handful of cranks so marginal only about half of their own public-facing members even live here. I have no illusions about anything I write making much of an impact in either of those media ecosystems, but I can keep doing my best to let the people of Clonmel know who this group really are, what they really believe and what they really care about.

This time, I have headings.

Continue reading “The Fire at Heywood Road” →