The Public Accounts Committee is to investigate how the Government has been left with a €30 million environmental clean-up bill for the former Irish Steel plant at Haulbowline in Cork Harbour.
Last Thursday the Government failed in its legal bid to have the liquidator for the last owner, Irish Ispat, meet the costs of the clean-up, which includes hazardous waste and radioactive material.
Senior PAC members yesterday confirmed they intend to hold preliminary hearings into the issue, when the committee reconvenes next month.
This weekend Mr Dan Boyle, Green TD for Cork South Central, and a member of PAC, called on the committee to undertake a full investigation into "how and why this cost was allowed to increase, and why toxic and hazardous materials still remain on the island".
He said that, rather than launching a clean-up of the site when it closed in 2001, the Government had undertaken an expensive lengthy and futile legal case to try and force the liquidator to carry the costs.
"The Government has followed a strategy to contest who was responsible for the clean-up. In the meantime, the cost of the cleaning up of the site had gone higher and higher. In 2001 it could have been done for far less than 30 million."
Earlier this year the PAC was briefed in private by senior officials from the Department of Enterprise and Employment after Mr Boyle raised the case.
It was informed that the clean-up would cost at least 30 million, but that the State was confident of winning a High Court case to force the liquidator of the company to assume responsibility for the cost.
"I think when you consider the amount of taxpayers' money that has already gone into Irish Steel, you have to question why the State is faced with another 30 million, and potentially more if the costs increase," said chairman of the PAC, Mr John Perry, FG TD for Sligo-Leitrim.
In the High Court last Thursday Ms Justice Carroll dismissed the case against Irish Ispat and its liquidator, Mr Ray Jackson.
Mr Jackson argued that it was unfair for the company's creditors to shoulder the financial cost of the remediation work.
The cost of rehabilitating the site, where hazardous waste and radioactive scrap materials had been identified, had been estimated at €30 million in a report which was commissioned by the State.
In an affidavit, one of the authors had said that unless the recommendations of the report were implemented, there was a serious risk that environmental pollution would occur in the future.