IRISH WATER HAS hired 519 staff so far, but nearly half of those positions (248) were not open to public competition, it has been revealed.

Environment Minister Alan Kelly said last Thursday that as of 30 September, 153 Irish Water workers were recruited from local authorities, 88 from Bord Gáis, and five from within his own department.

The remainder (271) were hired through an open, public competition.

The Labour minister said that the Steering Group for the Water Sector Reform Programme had agreed to restrict certain hiring to “staff in the partner organisations (Bord Gáis Éireann), local authorities and my department in the first instance.”

This was so as to “ensure skills within the sector were fully availed of.”

The jobs involved were “below the senior management team level, in asset management, capital delivery and operations,” Kelly said, in answer to a parliamentary question from Reform Alliance TD Terence Flanagan.

Irish Water doesn’t directly hire water metering or customer care call centre staff.

Instead, they use four “regional contractors” to manage the water metering programme: GMC Sierra, the Murphy Group, the Coffey Group, and Belfast-based Farrans Construction.

The utility contracts out its call centre jobs to Abtran, a Cork-based company that specialises in “business process outsourcing.”

The Irish Water website currently lists five vacancies, in the areas of procurement/project management, IT, finance, and a management role in the metering programme.

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