FINAL COSTS of the Mahon tribunal could be as high as €300 million, according to chairman of the Public Accounts Committee John McGuinness.
Minister for the Environment and Local Government Phil Hogan said he believed the costs could be about €250 million, “a substantial amount of money for malpractices that have gone on over a long period of time”.
But Mr McGuinness said the amounts being mentioned for costs were “guesstimates”.
No system of management had been created on behalf of the taxpayer by the Department of Environment and Local Government to monitor any of the legal contributions, he said, and “there is no way of assessing just how much this tribunal could cost”.
He noted that the Comptroller Auditor General estimate was €111 million to €141 million. “But it could cost €300 million,” he said.
“We do know from the 82 third party bills submitted today that 71 have been agreed at a total cost of €9.9 million, but nothing else has been paid.”
In 2007, the then secretary of the Department of Finance told the Public Accounts Committee that no record had been kept by the tribunal of work done by legal counsel.
“There was no system at the tribunal that noted on a daily basis what representation attended or the costs of the various discovery orders,” he said at the time.
Last week, secretary general of the Department of Environment and Local Government Geraldine Tallon told the committee the costs would only be known when they were submitted by legal representatives, but that there was no means of verifying those attendances.
Wicklow and East Carlow Fine Gael TD Simon Harris said the public wanted to know what had happened in the “many cases examined by the tribunal but they will be sickened by the cost of the report”.
A supplementary estimate might be necessary to allow for extra costs, he said, and “people are going to rightly ask at what cost did we get the truth”.
The tribunal, which investigated planning irregularities in Dublin County Council is expected to report imminently, most likely this week. Established in 1997, it sat in public for 917 days.
