ENVIRONMENT MINISTER PHIL Hogan has been accused of “gross double standards” after it emerged that he had met Michael Lowry days after the publication of the Moriarty Tribunal report.
Sinn Féin councillor Micheál Mac Donncha said Hogan was prepared to meet Lowry, but had refused to hold talks with the residents of Priory Hall.
Former Fine Gael communications minister Michael Lowry was censured in the Tribunal report, which found that he had influenced the awarding of the second GSM mobile phone license to Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone consortium.
Mac Donncha suggested that it was not appropriate for Hogan to have met Lowry after the Tribunal’s findings, while now refusing to meet the Priory Hall residents. He said:
This is the Minister who doggedly refuses to meet the residents of Priory Hall who have been put through a terrible ordeal because of scandalous neglect by developers, the local authority and the State. Yet a few days after the publication of the Moriarty Report Minister Hogan hosted Deputy Lowry and a business delegation in his Customs House office.
Juno McEnroe reports in the Irish Examiner that Hogan granted Lowry the longest scheduled meeting with any TD or senator during his first year in office, six days after the Tribunal’s report was published.
A department official also attended the meeting, to which Lowry brought a firm from his Tipperary constituency lobbying for changes to farm waste legislation.
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