Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The lack of transparency and accountability in this case is the issue that is most annoying the people. I heard the Taoiseach tell the House today that where there is an issue of public ownership, there should be no secrecy. I remind the House that 41 public bodies will be exempt from the new freedom of information legislation. A further 24 public bodies will be partially exempt. I suggest that has nothing to do with transparency or accountability. It is very annoying to people that mad sums of money are being paid to private consultants. I admit that it is nothing new. It has been part of the State's history. The previous Government paid Merrill Lynch €7 million for 14 pages of work, most of which was lies, in 2008. It is not long since Arthur Cox got €27 million for three years of legal work.

The idea of value for money is an important one. It is all very well to say that a certain company got one amount and another company got another amount. Where is the breakdown? If I build a wall for someone, I will be asked to account for material and labour. I have to explain where the entire bill came from. These people are not doing that. I will give an example. One of the main tasks for which Accenture received €17.2 million was dealing with work processes. In actual fact, it tried to reinvent the wheel in an impractical way. The same company is pretty famous for overcharging and for over-analysing a client's problems. It is an offspring of Andersen Consulting, which did not have a wonderful reputation. The stuff the consultants produced was not practical. The local authorities rejected it and told the consultants to start again. They did it again, step by step, with the help of the local authorities.

All of this cost millions of euro. Where was the value for money? Can anyone tell us why it cost so much? Can we get a breakdown of all the consultants' costs and an explanation of where they came from? It does not stack up that they were allowed to get away with this. I am sure John Tierney is a decent man. I challenged his appointment in this House a couple of months ago. Why was an engineer not appointed? Is this man out of his depth as he tries to accomplish the task he faces? Who actually made the decision to appoint him?

See this speech in context