Donegal Co Council in spotlight over alleged planning irregularities

Donegal County Council was placed firmly under the spotlight during Wednesday night's RTÉ Investigates: Council Chamber Secrets programme in relation to alleged planning irregularities.

According to the RTE 1 team, the council provides a striking example of where a report is conducted on foot of allegations concerning a local authority, only never to be released.

In this case, a government department has spent more than €170,000 on three reports concerning alleged planning irregularities in Donegal County Council, according to records released to RTÉ Investigates through freedom of information.

Of those, two have never been published.

At the centre of all of this was former council employee, Gerard Convie. He worked as a planner with the council for over 20 years in the 1980s and 1990s, and whose allegations ultimately prompted the various reports.

In 2000, he was accused of not declaring an interest in a property that was the subject of a pre-planning meeting.

"At the time, it was a criminal offence with a criminal sanction," Mr Convie told RTÉ Investigates.

Following a fractious internal inquiry, the council asked the then-Environment Minister, Noel Dempsey, to sack Mr Convie. In 2000, Mr Dempsey approved the council's request.

Facing financial and reputational ruin, Mr Convie asked the High Court to intervene – taking on the Minister, the Donegal county manager, and the State.

The case was settled, and the council clarified that it had not made any allegations of corruption or wrongdoing, and the charge of misconduct was withdrawn.

Mr Convie resigned and acknowledged he had made an error of judgement solely concerning specific aspects of planning.

He went into private practice and began studying planning decisions made by the council, compiling a dossier of what he believed were planning irregularities.

Mr Convie approached the Standards in Public Office Commission, the Department of Environment, and various members of the Oireachtas. But, despite his best efforts, the dossier attracted little interest.

However, when Green Party TD John Gormley was appointed Minister for the Environment following the 2007 general election, this changed, and his department engaged an external planning assessor to examine Mr Convie’s allegations. However, the assessor’s work was never published.

The department later hired consultants to look at planning in Donegal, and six other local authorities, which were also alleged to have planning issues.

In 2012, that report was published amid a flurry of excitement in the Dáil.

The then-Minister for the Environment, Phil Hogan, told the Dáil: "The report states clearly that it is not giving a clean bill of health to the entire planning system. It concludes, however, that in these seven cases, there is no evidence of wrongdoing."

In 2015, Alan Kelly, who replaced Phil Hogan as Minister for the Environment, took up the case and initiated another inquiry.

Senior counsel Rory Mulcahy was appointed to conduct this inquiry. According to correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act, he completed and delivered his report – which came to more than 300 pages and appendices – in June 2017.

But, once again, this report was never released, despite various information requests.

Green Party TD Patrick Costello has called for the report to be released.

"It’s a fundamental public importance that this report comes out," he told RTÉ Investigates.

"It's only by seeing what's in this report and understanding the irregularities and what caused them and what was behind them that we can take steps to prevent the next one."

The matter, however, is not over says the RTE programme.

Last year, the High Court ordered the Standards in Public Office Commission to reopen Mr Convie’s complaints on ethical and financial matters and reassess them.

Donegal County Council told RTÉ Investigates that it had cooperated with all "statutory inquiries involved, and that remains the case".

Mr Convie added: "I just believe that in the matters I have raised, I'm disappointed that certain sections within the county council have let down the people of Donegal."

Separately, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage said that Minister Darragh O’Brien would bring the report to Government in due course. It said Mr Mulcahy had been asked to carry out a scoping review, and he did not form any conclusion as to the truth.