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.
Left in the Lurch 