Audit exposes €130,000 payment to a turf-cutting consultant with weak oversight

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s 2025 report criticised the Department of Heritage for hiring a bog plot owner on a €130,000 contract—paid at €105 per hour for 1,234 hours—without any competitive procurement, to boost participation in a compensation scheme for ceasing turf cutting on protected bogs. The audit found scant documentation of the consultant’s activities and could not verify how many of the 392 new applicants actually benefited, noting that seven of thirty sampled compensation files lacked evidence that cutting had stopped.

In a separate development, former Democratic Unionist Party leader Jeffrey Donaldson and his wife Eleanor listed their four-bedroom Dromore house for £649,950 after incurring legal expenses of roughly £500,000 related to child-sex-offence charges. Additionally, RTÉ’s coverage of Ireland’s 3-0 Nations League victory over Israel, broadcast from a near-empty stadium in Debrecen, Hungary, drew an average audience of 478,000, outpacing the prior loss to Kosovo, and demonstrated continued viewer interest despite the political controversy surrounding the match.