Controversies and governance issues that have arisen in a State fisheries agency are “very serious and unacceptable”, the Department of Climate, Energy and Environment is expected to tell the Dáil Public Accounts Committee.
In an opening statement at a hearing on Thursday its secretary general Oonagh Buckley is expected to say that the matters were “very damaging” for Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) and that the agency had “a significant task ahead of it to restore and maintain public confidence”.
IFI chairman Tom Collins is expected to tell the committee the agency has been in “stormy waters” for a number of years.
“Despite much organisational change and improvement, IFI has not as yet fully navigated its way through these waters.”
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He is expected to say the agency had received 38 protected disclosures highlighting matters of concern since 2022, of which 29 were anonymous. Before that date, protected disclosures were rare.
Collins is anticipated to say there was a background of “serious historical governance issues in the organisation”, which were examined at previous meetings of the Public Accounts Committee in 2023, 2024 and last December.
A special report by the Comptroller and Auditor General last autumn highlighted issues including a failure on the then board’s part to delegate prosecutorial powers to IFI staff, resulting in the withdrawal of a significant number of prosecutions before the court before 2023.
Remaining board members were also removed on a no-fault basis by then minister for the environment, Eamon Ryan, in 2023 with two appointees taking on the functions of the organisation up to the appointment of the current board in January 2024.
Collins is expected to say “the aftershocks of these upheavals and of the other matters dealt with in the special audit report continue to reverberate through the organisation”.
IFI is to appear again before the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday, three months after members expressed unhappiness at some answers they received at an earlier hearing in December.
It is anticipated that Collins will say the meeting of December 4th was “a source of serious concern to all of us in IFI” but there had been a number of inaccurate statements made by members of the committee on the day.
IFI is a non-commercial State agency with responsibility for protecting and managing the State’s inland fishery resources. It has a staff of about 300 and a budget of more than €35 million.
However, IFI has been at the centre of a number of controversies over recent years.
The comptroller’s report last October identified serious deficiencies in internal controls, including dozens of credit cards given to employees and an uninsured vehicle involved in a crash leading to a €230,000 repair bill.
Infighting that had been going on in the background for several years burst into the open over three days at the Workplace Relations Commission earlier this month.
In an employment dispute case, former IFI chief executive Francis O’Donnell made a series of explosive claims about fraud at the agency and allegations about how he had been threatened and blackmailed over steps taken to investigate it.
O’Donnell is claiming in the case – which is scheduled to resume in June – that he was unfairly dismissed by IFI and penalised for making protected disclosures. The former chief executive contended he had been blackmailed by a senator who was not identified directly.
