The official, formerly a senior planning officer, was recently moved to a different department. He is the second senior official in the Waterford planning office to be arrested as part of the investigation, which began last year.
The other official was arrested last November and has since been questioned under caution for a second time. Two weeks ago a man who owns land in Ardmore, outside Dungarvan, was arrested as part of the investigation and his house was searched by detectives.
In the week that Frank Dunlop, the disgraced former lobbyist, appeared back in the witness stand at the Mahon planning tribunal, the garda investigation suggests that planning irregularities still stalk Irish council offices. Dunlop said last week that he paid at least IR£10,000 to some councillors in Dublin in the early 1990s in return for having land in Rathfarnham rezoned.
Allegations of planning irregularities in Waterford which led to the current garda investigation, surfaced in 2001 when John Deasy, then a Fine Gael councillor and now a TD, claimed backhand payments were being made for rezoning and planning permission.
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Last April a complaint about alleged planning corruption in Waterford was made by a member of the public. After a brief internal inquiry, the council asked the gardai to continue the investigation.
Gardai say the investigation is based in an incident room in Dungarvan. All of the 23 elected councillors have been questioned at least once. One councillor who spoke to The Sunday Times last week claimed that corrupt practices had continued even after the garda investigation began.
“It’s fairly deep-rooted,” the councillor said. “There seems to have been a bit of a cartel operating in there. I’ve been visited by the gardai on three occasions so far. They’ve even asked for my recollections of area meetings this year in relation to the current county development plan, which will run until 2009.
“Basically there was an accusation that one of the people involved, even though the garda investigation was under way, was still attempting to influence councillors on whose land they were going to zone and whose land they weren’t.
“A lot of it has centred around an area outside Dungarvan but there are questions about permissions granted in Ring, too. There were people who couldn’t get planning but an official bought the land they couldn’t get planning on and, lo and behold, got planning for it.”
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Another councillor agreed that the suspected planning corruption had continued despite the garda investigation. “They just don’t care,” he said.
“Whether the gardai will be able to get to the bottom of it I don’t know,” said one councillor. “But I think if they could prove something you’ll see more than the officials working there implicated.”
One source said councillors were lobbied by a “senior official” to “rezone land near Dungarvan from agricultural to residential use”. The source also said that a councillor made an official complaint to senior staff at the local authority after he was approached.
Other types of alleged corruption revolve around developers avoiding the mandatory 20% contribution of any development to social or affordable housing.