IRT – Slugger O'Toole

NI Water: “How did PwC get it so wrong?”

Mick Fealty on August 31, 2010, 3:36 pm | Readers 111

On Friday, Diana Rusk had an interesting take on the NI Water issue. She highlights a memo from last April in which the Finance Minister, Sammy Wilson, responds to a request for an explanation for why Price-Waterhouse Coopers awarded Northern Ireland Water exemplar status on its procurement practice, when the same organisation has just sacked its Board for the same issue. The questions sharpen somewhat when you take into account that PwC have a number of those £28 million worth …

Ni Water: Questions for the Minister…

Mick Fealty on August 18, 2010, 7:16 pm | Readers 4

Interesting to hear Paul Maskey push the line that his Minister took swift and decisive action on members of the NI Water Board. But if his Permanent Secretary’s position is now untenable, so too must be the report on foot of which the Minister sacked the Board. You might have thought. As Jamie Delargy noted this evening on UTV, no one would accept a chief constable having a say in a report into the death of a child in police …

NI Water: Board prevented from acting on contents of Internal Audit?

Mick Fealty on July 30, 2010, 5:12 pm | Readers 20

The Coalition government at Westminster clearly attach great public importance to Non Executive Directors on Departmental Boards. On his appointment as lead Non Executive Director to the Government, Lord Browne of Madingley laid out this description of the role of NEDs to departmental boards: “This is a role within Government but also independent of it. Its purpose is to assist in the delivery of policy using relevant experience from business. There is a great need for the best of the …

NI Water: When is a final report not a final report?

Mick Fealty on July 20, 2010, 1:42 pm | Readers 3

First, a detail from the Hansard record of the PAC. It comes from Mr Priestly’s opening remarks, so there is no question of his misspeaking under pressure. The review team delivered its final report to me on 18 February. Once I became aware of the problem, swift action was taken. But here’s the problem. Looking at the timeline again, the 18th was the date of the second draft, not the first nor the final, which only officially arrived with the …

NI Water: What was Dixon’s competence to adjudicate on a GoCo/NDPB?

Mick Fealty on July 19, 2010, 3:48 pm | Readers 84

Gerry Loughran’s letter to John Dallat re NI Water makes for interesting reading (Update: the BBC covered the letter story this evening). Loughran is Peter Dixon’s Chair at Phoenix Gas, and a former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service. In his response leaves both John Dallat, and Paul Maskey, the chair of the PAC whom he dutifully copies in, in no doubt of his view of Mr Dixon’s intemperate outburst the week before last: Mr Dixon was aggrieved by …

NI Water Timeline: “Administrative procedures are the responsibility of management…”

Mick Fealty on July 16, 2010, 10:55 am | Readers 40

I’ve been working on a timeline of the NI Water story just to try and put some of the material we have into some kind of objective order… I’ve gone for completion rather than trying to hone in on any one aspect… However a number of things jump out… One is how long Priestly is in post before any of the problems identified by MacKenzie emerge (Hansard also tells us Nicola Brennan conducted three successive audits without finding them either). Two, …

NI Water: Were the IRT’s Terms of Reference ‘Gerrymandered’?

Mick Fealty on July 13, 2010, 3:19 pm | Readers 19

The latest we hear is that DRD/NIW are having problems getting anyone to take on the role of chairman of NI Water. Slugger understands that a number of individuals have declined an approach. It is not difficult to see why. As a careful reading of the final report makes clear the IRT itself did not believe there was a substantive connection between the CEO’s problems with a Board that refused to rescind his resignation and the report’s headline problem of …