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 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.

Continue reading “Mattie McGrath’s Incoherence on Housing” →
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 Irish Politics

Michael Lowry Voted with Government More Than 75% in Last Dáil

Michael Lowry sided with the government on more than 75% of votes in the 33rd Dáil, according to data from an analysis of voting patterns by writer and activist Conall Mc Callig. I asked Conall for the stats on Tipp’s five incumbent TDs, four of whom are seeking reelection on the 29th of November, including Lowry.

Fianna Fáil’s Jackie Cahill, Tipp’s only government TD since 2016, unsurprisingly tops the table, voting with the government 99.3%. However, Cahill declared he wouldn’t be running again due to health concerns, and was replaced on the ticket by Cllrs. Michael Smith of Roscrea and Ryan O’Meara of Cloughjordan.

Sinn Féin’s Martin Browne voted with the government least often, just 4.46% of the time, followed by independent Mattie McGrath on 8.9% and Labour’s Alan Kelly on 15.53%.

But Michael Lowry stands well apart from his colleagues, voting with the government 77.3% of the time. To give a sense of scale, he has voted with the outgoing government more than twice as often as the other three incumbents combined, and closer to thrice as often than twice.

Interestingly, he’s also the only Tipp TD to never abstain on a vote in the 33rd Dáil.

Lowry is the third-longest-serving TD in the Dáil, at just over 37.5 years, after his former party colleague Bernard Durkan (43.5) and FF’s Willie O’Dea (42.5), and just ahead of the Tánaiste Micheál Martin at 35.5 years.

He was a Fine Gael TD from his first election in 1987 until late 1996, and served as Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications under Taoiseach John Bruton. He was forced to resign after it emerged that supermarket tycoon Ben Dunne paid for a £395,000 extension to Lowry’s home (equivalent to almost a million euro today). He was reelected as an independent in the 1997 election and has stood as one ever since.

The contrast between his voting patterns and the other incumbents seeking reelection is also reflected when comparing the TDs’ votes to the aggregate votes of their Dáil grouping.

Martin Browne (4.46%) voted with the government half as often as Sinn Féin (9.15%), while Alan Kelly (15.53%) voted with the government slightly more than Labour (12.02%) and Mattie McGrath (8.9%) voted with the government slightly less than the Rural Group (10.36%).

Meanwhile, Lowry at 77.3% voted with the government much more often than the Regional Group at 53.24%. He was the second-most pro-government TD sitting in opposition during the 33rd Dáil, after his Regional Group colleague Noel Grealish (excluding Joe McHugh and Marc MacSharry, who started on the government benches before moving to opposition).

Lowry announced his reelection bid surprisly late in the day, prompting speculation in Tipp political circles he might step aside for his son Micheál or one of the other councillors elected under the Lowry Group banner in June.

He was interviewed in August of this year by Gardaí from the Criminal Assets Bureau investigating matters arising from the Moriarty Tribunal. The Tribunal’s final report, published in 2011, found “beyond doubt” that Lowry corruptly influenced the awarding of Ireland’s second mobile telephone license to Esat Telecom, owned by billionaire Denis O’Brien, among other wrongdoing.

Lowry rejects the report, and refused to resign following an all-party motion in the Dáil calling on him to do so after its publication.