THERE IS something farcical about the way the Dublin Docklands Development Authority responds to questions from the media.

Stephen Mackerel, chief executive of the Carphone Warehouse group, contacted my colleague Colm Keena this week to express his frustration with the way the authority does its business.

Among his claims was that he couldn’t get direct contact with the authority’s executive so as to discuss their landlord-tenant relationship.

Very often, he said, the authority commissioned third parties to respond to his efforts to establish contact, wasting taxpayers’ money as it did so.

Carphone Warehouse is based in the ghost-like CHQ retail complex in the IFSC.

Two weeks ago, we carried a piece about commercial tenants and their gripes with the authority. In response to a query from Colm a spokeswoman for the authority, Elizabeth Taylor, said there were “a number of debts outstanding to the authority which it is vigorously pursuing and it would be inappropriate to comment further”.

Taylor is the authority’s in-house PR manager and when contacted yesterday to allow her respond to Mackerel’s complaints, she took note of the details and soon afterwards said the matter would be handled by Ruth Hickey of the Communications Clinic.

Hickey, when contacted, had been briefed by Taylor. She said the authority had nothing to say other than to repeat the comment made two weeks ago.

So why was she involved? And why is public money being wasted by such duplication?

This also strongly backs up one of Mackerel’s key complaints.

Fine Gael says it wants to cull 145 quangos. The authority looks ripe for picking.