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 Political Analysis

RFK Jr. Wants to Exterminate Autistic People

It feels perverse that I should have to write this piece. It is perverse. I should not have to explain to anyone, least of all those who joyfully sing from his hymn sheet, that Robert Kennedy Jr. wants to exterminate autistic people.

I should not have to explain it to anyone because it should be obvious from any moderately critical examination of how he has spent the last two and a half decades of his life.

RFK Jr., son of the late Bobby Kennedy, initially built his career as an environmental lawyer, bringing cases against polluters, but around the turn of the century, he was taken in by the fraudulent claims of disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, who essentially kickstarted the modern anti-vaccine movement by falsely linking the MMR vaccine to autism as part of a money-making scheme.

Since then, RFK Jr. has dedicated his public life to campaigning against vaccines, not linking them exclusively to autism, but primarily to autism, and the reason he does it is very simple.

RFK Jr. believes it is better to die of a preventable illness than to be autistic.

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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 Irish Politics

Mattie McGrath’s Incoherence on Housing

South Tipp TD Mattie McGrath made a curious contribution during a Dáíl housing debate last week, video of which he shared on his Facebook page. Here’s the relevant portion, quoted from the Dáíl record:

“It is a mammoth task. We have to get real. The idea of the left here is that we cannot have private contractors or developers. If we do not have private developers involved, we will not build the houses, full stop. I would love to be back in the 1940s and 1950s when the county council had manpower and built the houses, but those days are gone. We have to get over these ideologies, stop objecting to housing being built and encourage the voluntary sector. I am a member of Caislean Nua Voluntary Housing Association. It is the proudest thing I was ever involved in. We built 17 houses. That is not many but it was a voluntary committee. If every village and hamlet built ten, we would halve the housing crisis.”

What’s curious about it is that I was under the impression that Mattie McGrath regarded the gutting of local authorities, their resources and manpower, as a bad thing that should be reversed. Once upon a time, he joined a High Court action to challenge the constitutionality of the abolition and merger of various local authorities under the Fine Gael / Labour austerity coalition, and hardly a day goes by he does not bemoan the abolition of Clonmel Borough Council in particular. That the loss of that council has been disastrous for services and development in Clonmel is something on which Deputy McGrath and I agree.

But apparently, the idea that councils should be resourced, staffed and empowered to build public housing at scale is a suggestion to be dismissed out of hand as unrealistic, and more than that, ideological. Deputy McGrath starts by attacking the strawman idea that “the left” want to abolish all private housing development, but what he actually attacks is the notion of public housing itself. This is at odds not only with his professed views on councils, but his professed views on housing.

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Dean Buckley The Conspiracist Papers

Notes on Staring into the Abyss

I could never explain how or why I became fascinated with conspiracy theories. It started at such a young age I can’t even work out a decent timeline of when I first encountered some of the books, films and TV shows I now regard as formative. I know I bought six books on a 2 for 3 deal when I was in primary school – four Dan Brown novels, a book about Atlantis I never actually read and The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories – and if I was interested before that purchase, I was obsessed soon after. It’s been a greater or lesser focus of mine at different times in my life, but it’s also been a gateway to other interests: cults, con artists, the occult, misinformation, pseudoscience, radicalisation, extremism. I am not an expert in anything, but I am a connoisseur of fringe, fanatical and false belief. I have spent thousands of hours across my entire life reading books, articles and documents, watching films, TV shows and YouTube videos, and especially in the last few years, listening to podcasts, because learning about strange beliefs and why people believe them is just one of the best ways I can imagine spending my time.

It is traditionally around this point I would stop to reassure you, in case it wasn’t clear, that I may be interested in conspiracy theories, but I am not myself a conspiracy theorist. And it is true that, whatever you imagine in your head when you think “conspiracy theorist”, I am not that. I am not a paranoid person who detects the hidden hand of some mysterious “Them” in current events. I do not believe in secret rulers and grand plans, or anything that breaks the laws of physics, denies the general historical record, defies sense or can’t be substantiated with credible evidence. I do not believe in the supernatural or paranormal and I despise all pseudoscience and medical quackery. I’m Catholic, and obviously believe in things beyond the material world, but they don’t affect how I view physical reality, because they are beyond the material world.

But I am, strictly speaking, a conspiracy theorist. I just don’t like to call myself one because it carries so much cultural baggage beyond its literal meaning. I want to disavow it because it’s radioactive, not because it’s unfair. Most people don’t use “conspiracy theorist” as a neutral descriptor for anyone who theorises conspiracy. If you call a cop or journalist investigating a criminal conspiracy a conspiracy theorist, you’re impugning their credibility and implying their allegations are fantasy. I do not believe in secret rulers and grand plans, but I do believe that conspiracy – people making secret plans to achieve goals through underhanded means – is a normal feature of human society. I also believe that conspiracy has played – and continues to play – a larger role in shaping the course of history than is commonly or officially acknowledged. The problem is that the concept of conspiracy itself has been tainted by the concept of conspiracy theories, to the extent the two terms are often used interchangeably (e.g. “that’s not true, that’s just a conspiracy!”). It turns the whole topic of conspiracy into a minefield and it doesn’t even help to reassure people you’re not crazy, because that’s exactly what crazy people say.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve lived my entire life within a historically unprecedented explosion of conspiratorial belief that has itself shaped the course of history more than we yet realise. Before the nineties, conspiracy theorists weren’t really part of the public zeitgeist outside pop culture, at least in the English-speaking world, but then 9/11 happened and now conspiracist belief is a fixture of global politics. Donald Trump alone is both the most famous, influential conspiracy theorist ever and possibly the subject of more conspiracy theories than anyone else in history. His most fanatical followers tried to overthrow the US government when he lost the 2020 election, and now he’s staffed his second, more openly fascist administration with multiple open conspiracy theorists.

It feels like reality is cracking apart from the inside, all of us stuck on one planet, but trapped in parallel worlds. Trying to find accurate information about a recent news event on the Internet is like wading through a hall of mirrors flooded with raw sewage. The danger of conspiratorial belief has never been more obvious and people’s wariness of it never more justified. I want to write about conspiracism in large part because I believe it is an immediate, growing threat to society and we must stop its spread or humanity is fucked. After all, there may be no conspiracy theory more widespread than denial of the climate crisis.

But we can’t accept the stigmatisation of belief in conspiracy as the cost of stopping its most destructive forms. We live in a profoundly corrupt world where a tiny elite hoard wealth and power for themselves and it only serves their interests to make claims of conspiracy taboo. It’s not just what they’ll do, either, it’s what they’ve already done. Every unacknowledged conspiracy is an unadmitted crime, every cover-up is a conspiracy itself. Countless people alive today are still fighting for the basic truth about atrocities committed before TVs had remote controls. Countless more are dead. They all deserve justice and they can’t get it when those who conspire against them can just slander them as conspiracy theorists. But it’s not just wrong, it wouldn’t even work. It hasn’t worked. It’s how we got here. Conspiracy theorists have only become more and more stigmatised in my lifetime and they’ve never been more numerous or influential. It’s the punchline at the end of history.

When you make conspiracy unspeakable, you make conspiracism inevitable.

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