The two State officials responsible for elections in Cork city and county have emerged as the owners of the two facilities that the State is renting to store electronic voting machines in the region.
The Department of the Environment provided a list detailing the owners of 25 locations where the 7,504 machines are being stored, at a cost of over €658,000 per year, including rates and insurance, to the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (Pac).
The request followed revelations last month that both the Dublin city and county returning officers, Mr Brendan Walsh and Mr John Fitzpatrick, who are responsible for ensuring the safe storage of the machines, were also the owners of the premises where they are stored.
In the vast majority of cases the owner of the premises had no connection with the returning officer in question.
However in Cork city, the Department of the Environment list names the City Sheriff and returning officer, Martin Harvey, and his wife, as the owners of the building in Ballygarvan where machines are stored. The total cost of storage in relation to Cork city, which included insurance, rates and other charges, was €27,208 per anum, or €53 per machine.
The owner of the storage facility in Cork county is also the returning officer and County Sheriff, Michael O'Driscoll, where the cost per machine, at the Togher building, is €88.50.
In the four Dublin and Cork cases, similar explanations were given that each returning officer was unable to rent a suitable building to store the machines and had decided to buy one instead. In the case of Cork and Dublin, three independent valuations were obtained and the lowest sought in each case.
The explanation in the case of Dublin County was that Mr Fitzpatrick, who is also Dublin County Sheriff, had bought a premises along with a business partner Kevin McGarry, and had moved the returning officer and county sheriff offices, to this building. An independent valuation was also sought in relation to the storage of the machines.
According to the list provided to the Pac, the auctioneer asked by Waterford's returning officer to find a suitable premises, John Rohan, was a shareholder along with his wife in the premises that was found to store the machines.
The storage costs in Waterford, at €271 per machine, or €52,888 in total, was among the highest unit storage costs in the country.
In Monaghan, the owner of the storage facility was a nephew of the returning officer, who has no beneficial interest in the building in question.
Last night the returning officer for Cork County, Michael O'Driscoll, said he had arranged temporary storage for the machines early in 2004 at a cost of €3,000 per month but that facility was too large and too expensive to continue using it.
Mr O'Driscoll's auctioneers found it impossible to get suitable premises in Cork city so he decided to use a premises which he owned himself to store the machines for which he receives €16,000 a year in rent from the Department of the Environment.
"I got an independent valuation of the premises from a well known auctioneer here in Cork and he suggested a rent of €6,000 a year, so fixing the rental was at arm's remove from me and I informed the Department of Environment of all this," he said .
Mr O'Driscoll said that he believed that charging €16,000 for storing 460 machines for a year was probably one of the better rates nationally, and compared favourably to some other counties where sums of up to €50,000 were charged for storing fewer machines.