The MV Matthew left Cork Harbour under tow shortly after eight o'clock on the evening of Friday 17 July, three years and ten months after the Army Ranger Wing fast-roped onto her deck from an Air Corps helicopter. A crowd gathered at Roches Point to watch her go. The coverage that weekend described a saga drawing to a close, a line finally being drawn and reported that she had been sold to a Dutch scrappage company for a nominal dollar.

She is not going to a scrapyard. A single Greek-flagged ocean tug, the Foteini, is towing her to Varna on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, where she is expected to arrive in the first week of August. The Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, Afloat and the international trade publication The Maritime Executive all report that she will be refitted there and returned to commercial service carrying grain. The Maritime Executive checked the tug's own position reporting and said so plainly. The early reports of a Dutch scrapping were wrong. She is bound for Varna and a return to trade.

So the sequence is this. The State detained a working bulk carrier. It spent €16,841,193 of public money keeping her in commercial condition for thirty-four months. It then transferred her to an unnamed international shipping company for one United States dollar and that company is putting her back to work.

Between those two facts sits a question that two members of the Public Accounts Committee asked out loud and that nobody in the Irish State has answered.

What it cost and what the money bought

Revenue has published the figures and they repay reading closely.

From September 2023 to the end of June 2026 the State paid €16,841,193 in respect of the MV Matthew. Berthing came to €3,894,678. Maintenance came to €7,388,825. Crewing came to €5,387,874. A further €169,816 went on forensic extraction, registration and survey work. The annual pattern runs €1,027,075 in 2023, €6,657,804 in 2024, €6,150,598 in 2025 and €3,005,717 in the first half of 2026.

Set beside the running costs Revenue gave the Public Accounts Committee, those numbers describe something specific. The ship cost about €110,000 a week. Thirteen crew were aboard at all times to keep her systems running. She was moved around Cork Harbour when berths were needed, past Passage West three or four times a month, which generated its own small stream of complaints about noise and smells.

That is not the cost of storing a hulk. Nobody spends €5.4 million on crew and €7.4 million on maintenance to preserve scrap. That is the cost of keeping a ship alive and the State paid it for the better part of three years. The asset the buyer collected for a dollar in July was in the condition it was in because the Irish taxpayer had spent nearly seventeen million euro putting it there.

There is a dead year inside that spend. Revenue has said the vessel ceased to be required for evidential purposes in December 2024. It has also said that it completed registration of title with the Panama Maritime Authority Ships Registry in December 2025 and that this was the milestone which allowed it to conclude a disposal agreement. Twelve months separate those two events. At the weekly rate Revenue itself gave the committee, that gap cost somewhere in the region of €5.7 million and no explanation for its length has ever been put on the public record. Nobody has asked for one.

The two questions

On 11 December 2025 the Chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, Niall Cody, appeared before the Public Accounts Committee. The MV Matthew came up sixteen separate times.

Joanna Byrne, the Sinn Féin TD for Louth, did the arithmetic herself before putting her question:

"The upkeep of the MV Matthew is costing a fortune. The amount of money involved is exorbitant. Nearly €10 million has been spent in less than two years. In other words, a startling amount of more than €100,000 a week. Mr. Cody is on record as saying the disposal of the vessel is a priority for Revenue, but that seems to be proving problematic. Has Revenue considered scuttling the vessel? There is precedent in that regard with the MV Shingle. The latter was moored in the port of Drogheda, my hometown, at certain times from 2014 until it was eventually sunk off the coast of County Mayo in 2024. If consideration has not been given to scuttling the MV Matthew, have we had a look at what price it will fetch in a sale or whether there would be a net profit or loss for the taxpayer?"

Cody answered the second half of that question and not the first. Later in the same session Catherine Ardagh, the Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin South Central, came at it from a different angle:

"In other jurisdictions when large vessels are seized or decommissioned, if it can be ensured there will be no environmental contamination, they sometimes sink the vessel and use it as a tourist attraction. Has that been considered by Revenue to draw a line under the MV Matthew?"

Cody's reply is worth quoting in full, because it is not a refusal and it is not an answer:

"The first artificial reef in Ireland was in Killala Bay and it is a result of us donating the MV Shingle, which Deputy Byrne mentioned earlier, to the Mayo Killala Bay Ships 2 Reef project. It was a great exercise. Councillor Michael Loftus was a major driver of that programme. The regulatory hoops we had to go through to get it to a stage where it could be towed to Killala Bay involved MSO surveys. The Department of public expenditure funded that to facilitate it and it has been a great success."

Revenue had done it. Revenue thought it had gone well. Revenue was asked whether it might do it again with a ship costing the State €110,000 a week. Revenue described the previous occasion in the past tense, then moved on. The question was never returned to.

Byrne did press him and said so out loud. When Cody moved to the operational background rather than the money, she cut in: "I think Mr. Cody is trying to avoid the question. Is there a figure that he has determined for what the sale of this vessel might bring in? Is it going to bring in a profit?" Cody's answer was two words. "Absolutely not." She got a straight answer on the loss. She never got one on the scuttling.

Neither exchange was reported at the time. The Irish Examiner's account of that hearing covers the cost and the choice between selling and scrapping. It mentions neither question. The ideas were raised in the correct forum, by elected members, on the record and they died in the room.

Neither deputy ever raised the ship again. Byrne's question of 11 December 2025 is the only time she has mentioned the MV Matthew in the Oireachtas record in her career. Ardagh's is likewise her only substantive mention. Neither tabled a parliamentary question, a Topical Issue or a Commencement Matter about the vessel in 2026. Neither spoke at the one 2026 committee session where it came up. The words scuttling and artificial reef were never connected to this ship again by any member of either House. For the record, "artificial reef" appears three times in the entire history of the Oireachtas and the MV Shingle four.

Two options and only two

What Revenue was considering, it stated clearly. Cody, at that same December hearing:

"There are probably two possibilities when we get to the end of the regulatory requirements. It will either be disposed of to be scrapped or there is a slight possibility it might be sold as a going vessel. If it is disposed of for scrappage, it will actually cost us more to scrap it."

He confirmed the same binary to Séamus McGrath at the Public Accounts Committee on 5 March 2026 and added the sentence that explains the entire disposal:

"Either way, I do not anticipate we will be getting a consideration for it. The key is to get it out of Irish hands."

The ministerial formula ran alongside it and sounds broader than it is. Paschal Donohoe, answering a parliamentary question in October 2025, said Revenue was "considering all options, including the recycling of the vessel, such that the disposal and removal of the vessel can proceed in the most expedient manner." Niall Collins repeated the wording in the Dáil a week later. Recycling here means commercial ship-breaking at a foreign yard. It does not mean dismantling in Ireland and it does not mean retention. All options meant two options.

Search the Oireachtas record for the ship's name and you get fifty-two results between October 2023 and June 2026. Every substantive one has been read for this piece. The two questions above are the only occasions on which anyone suggested the MV Matthew might be put to a use other than sale or scrap. Nobody proposed keeping her for the Defence Forces. Nobody proposed using her as a boarding-training hull, which is striking given that the Army Ranger Wing had boarded this exact ship at sea and that the Naval Service has almost no opportunity to train against a real one. Nobody proposed a search-training hull for Customs or the Garda drugs unit, on a vessel where finding two and a quarter tonnes of concealed cocaine had been the whole point. Nobody mentioned the National Maritime College of Ireland, which sits in Ringaskiddy, in the same harbour and trains Irish seafarers. Nobody proposed dismantling her here to build a capability the State does not have.

Ireland has no ship recycling facility on the European List. The Environmental Protection Agency says so itself, in a published answer to its own frequently asked question: "No. Ireland has no facilities listed in the most recent European List of ship recycling facilities." A country with 7,500 kilometres of coastline, an offshore wind programme that will one day have to be taken apart and a ship it was already paying to keep alive in a harbour containing a naval base, a working dockyard and the national maritime college, sent the work to the Black Sea.

They did think about who got her

The most revealing thing Cody told the committee is easy to miss. Explaining why the disposal had taken so long, he mentioned that Revenue had walked away from interested parties:

"when we carried out due diligence, we were concerned about the use that ship would have been put to if it had been sold to them."

So the State did form a judgement about what this ship might go on to do and acted on it. Somebody sat down, looked at a bidder, thought about the future use of a vessel that had already carried €157 million of cocaine and said no.

The capacity to think about a ship's onward life exists inside Revenue. It was exercised. It ran in exactly one direction: as a filter to exclude the wrong buyer, never as a case for keeping the ship. Revenue could ask what a private purchaser might do with her. It could not ask what Ireland might do with her, because there was no process in which that question had a place and no official whose job it was to raise it.

That is the difference between a gap in imagination and a gap in machinery. This was the second kind.

The precedent and the hole in it

Both TDs cited the MV Shingle and it is a real precedent. A sixty-metre cargo ship, seized off Drogheda in 2014 carrying thirty-two million cigarettes, forfeited to the State by High Court order in 2017, donated by Revenue to a local company in Mayo and sunk in Killala Bay on 18 September 2024 as Ireland's first artificial reef. Around €650,000 was spent removing asbestos and residual oils before she went down. Storm Éowyn later broke her into three sections.

The precedent has an unexamined problem and it needs stating carefully because it is a question rather than a finding.

Under the Dumping at Sea Act 1996, deliberately disposing of a vessel at sea is dumping and dumping requires a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency. There is an exception in the Act for "placement" of a vessel for a purpose other than mere disposal. That exception carries a proviso: where the placement is for a purpose other than the one the vessel was designed or constructed for, it must still comply with the sections of the Act that include the permit requirement. A cargo ship was not built to be a reef.

The EPA's certified Dumping at Sea register contains no entry for the MV Shingle. It contains no entry for Killala, for Mayo, or for any artificial reef. Every permit on it is for dredge spoil, with two pipeline abandonments as the only exceptions. On the published record the agency has never granted a permit to sink a vessel.

What the Killala project obtained instead was a Maritime Area Consent from the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, reference MAC20230007, for the "placement of the vessel, SV Shingle, on the seabed to create an artificial reef". That consent was determined on 21 May 2024 and its status on the public register now reads "Terminated". The ship was sunk on 18 September 2024. MARA's own guidance to developers lists an EPA dumping at sea permit as a separate authorisation sitting alongside a Maritime Area Consent, not as something a consent replaces.

There is a further complication. The OSPAR Convention's exception permitting the dumping of vessels in the north-east Atlantic expired on 31 December 2004 and that expiry is written into the Second Schedule of the Irish Act, which the EPA is obliged to consider when deciding on a permit. On the face of it, a permit to sink a ship in Irish waters may not have been available to grant since 2005.

None of that is an allegation. It is a set of documents that do not obviously fit together. The people who can reconcile them are the EPA and MARA. What it does mean is that the reef option Byrne and Ardagh raised was probably harder than it looked and that Revenue's silence in December may have reflected a real legal difficulty rather than simple incuriosity.

Which makes the silence worse, not better. If the honest answer to Joanna Byrne was that Ireland's only artificial reef was created by a route nobody can now clearly account for and that the route may not be open again, that is an answer the Public Accounts Committee was entitled to hear. It is also a policy problem sitting in plain sight, unowned, waiting for the next seized ship.

This is not the first time

The MV Matthew is the most expensive instance of something Ireland does regularly.

In March 2017 the State sold the decommissioned patrol vessel LÉ Aisling at public auction for €110,000. The sale was advertised internationally in Trade Winds and Lloyd's List, two bidders attended, a scrap dealer came and declined to bid. No reserve was set. On the evidence, €110,000 was what an open auction produced and the then Minister's insistence that "the suggestion that the ship was sold at undervalue is unsupported" is defensible.

What happened next is the point. The Dutch buyer sold her on within about a year for $525,000. She passed to a company in the United Arab Emirates and then to Libya for $1.5 million. The United Nations Panel of Experts on Libya found the supply chain had been "kept deliberately opaque", that a false declaration of demolition had been made to Panama and that the ship had been re-equipped in Benghazi with "one 40mm cannon and two 20mm cannons in exactly the same positions that they were in during Irish naval service". She ended up with Khalifa Haftar, in breach of a UN arms embargo.

Asked in the Dáil what safeguards existed to prevent that, Paul Kehoe offered this:

"In the same way that if she sold her car tomorrow morning, she could not guarantee that some criminal gang would not use it to rob a bank in three years' time, we sold this vessel and it was re-registered as a pleasure yacht."

The Department's formal position was that once the ship was sold it "ceased to have any trailing obligations" and had "no role or responsibility with regard to the future use of the vessel". Its legal reasoning was that stripping the guns meant the hull was no longer a warship. The military control list in force at the time said otherwise in terms, covering combatant vessels "whether or not converted to non-military use, regardless of current state of repair or operating condition". The UN reached the same conclusion, finding the vessel "is classified as a naval vessel, and thus falls under the auspices of military equipment". Ireland had decided the hull was a boat. The UN decided it was a weapon.

The pattern is older than the Aisling. In January 2015 the Department of Defence sold the Air Corps Gulfstream IV. The Comptroller and Auditor General examined that disposal and the numbers are unattractive. Total acquisition cost, including ten years of lease payments, was around €45 million. There was no tender and no auction. There was one bid. The buyer had first offered €836,000 conditional on the aircraft being made serviceable, the Department declined that because it had no sanction to spend more on the aircraft and the same buyer then paid €418,000 for it as seen. The supporting valuation cost €900. The aircraft was repaired by the purchaser using its own parts. It was on the United States civil register and flying within about two months.

The auditor's conclusion was careful and damning: "In the absence of a competitive sales process, it is difficult to conclude on whether best value was obtained." The recommendation that followed, that competitive processes be used for State assets of significant value, drew a formal response from the Accounting Officer reading, in full, "Not agreed in this case."

That is the case that has been examined. The warship that ended up armed in a civil war was not. The Comptroller and Auditor General has never audited a Naval Service vessel disposal. The Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence has never discussed the subject. Alan Farrell asked the Public Accounts Committee to take up the Aisling in May 2017; the committee wrote to the Department, received a letter on 22 June, resolved to note and publish it. That was the end of it. An aircraft sold for €418,000 got a dedicated audit chapter and a full committee hearing. A warship sold for €110,000 that was re-armed and entered a foreign war got a noted letter.

There is a final detail that says everything about how thin the ground is. In December 2019, defending the Aisling sale in the Dáil, the Minister cited the Comptroller and Auditor General's 2015 report and quoted its guidance on disposals with approval. That guidance is paragraph 8.41 of Chapter 8, the chapter criticising the Gulfstream sale, in the document where his own Department had written "Not agreed in this case."

Where would the thought have gone?

It is tempting to write this as a story about people not thinking. That would be wrong and it lets the actual failure off the hook.

Two TDs thought of it. They raised it in the right committee, to the right official, citing a real Irish precedent, at a moment when the meter was running at €110,000 a week. Revenue had itself created that precedent and described it as a success. Officials inside Revenue were capable of forming a considered view about a ship's future use and did so, at least when the question was which private buyer to refuse.

What was missing was anywhere for the thought to land. There is no unit in the Irish State whose job is to ask what else a public asset might be for. When the Department of Defence set out publicly, in written answers of February and March 2024, the options it had weighed for the decommissioned LÉ Eithne, LÉ Orla and LÉ Ciara, it listed four: donation of the Eithne as a museum piece, recycling at an EU approved facility, sale by public auction and a government to government transfer. Sinking any of them appears nowhere in that list. Revenue's menu had two items on it.

The interesting part is that the idea does occur to officials. Briefing documents released under freedom of information and reported by the Irish Times in January 2024 indicate the Department had internally considered sinking the Eithne as a diving attraction before settling on recycling. So the thought arises, gets weighed somewhere inside a department and then does not survive into the published account of what was considered, let alone into practice. That is not an absence of ideas. It is an absence of any process that obliges an idea to be answered in public. The Department of Public Expenditure's disposal circulars define property as land and buildings, so a ship or an aircraft is not covered by them. Nobody could point to the statutory power under which a Minister sells a warship, because neither the Defence Act 1954 nor the State Property Act 1954 appears to contain one. The Department's "standing policy for the disposal of surplus defensive equipment", cited by ministers repeatedly across a decade, has never been published.

A question with no institutional home does not get answered. It gets absorbed. Byrne's question and Ardagh's question were not refused, argued down or defeated. They were received politely and allowed to dissipate, because there was no desk they could be sent to and no official who would have been in trouble for failing to consider them.

So the State did the only thing its machinery was shaped to do. It got the ship out of Irish hands.

There is one more date worth putting beside the others. The Dáil rose for its summer recess on Thursday 16 July 2026 and does not return until 17 September. The MV Matthew left Cork under tow on Friday 17 July. Revenue confirmed the sale and the dollar on Saturday 18 July.

No parliamentary question could be asked about the price, because there was no parliament sitting to ask it in. By the time the Dáil returns the ship will have been in Bulgaria for six weeks and the news will be two months old. Nothing about that sequence requires anybody to have planned it. It is simply what an unexamined disposal looks like when it finally completes: the last public moment at which the decision could have been questioned had already passed before the decision became public.

No TD, no Senator and no party issued a word about it. Not one of the reports that weekend mentioned that the question of another use had been asked at all.

She will be in Varna in the first week of August. Her IMO number is 9228150, which does not change when a ship is renamed and the vessel databases have already begun rendering her as MATTHEW TT. Some time after that she will start carrying grain around the Black Sea for an owner nobody in Ireland has named, in a hull the Irish taxpayer spent €16.8 million keeping seaworthy, bought for the price of a newspaper.

Got a better idea?

This is the first of an occasional series. The pattern here is not that Irish officials lack imagination. It is that the State has no organ for generating alternatives and no obligation to consider them, so good questions asked in the right room dissipate for want of anywhere to go.

That gap can be filled from outside, badly and partially but filled. Have you worked in marine salvage, ship recycling, naval training, customs enforcement, maritime law or state asset disposal? Then you may see what should have been done with this ship. The comment thread is open. What is worth publishing gets published, in a follow-up that puts the best of it to the bodies concerned.

If you work inside any of those bodies and cannot say so publicly, there is a PGP key on the contact page.

Five questions remain open. This piece could not answer them from the public record.

Why did registration of title with Panama take twelve months after the ship ceased to be required as evidence, at a cost of roughly €5.7 million? What does "Terminated" mean on Maritime Area Consent MAC20230007 and under what instrument was the MV Shingle's sinking authorised? Is a permit to sink a vessel in Irish waters available at all since the OSPAR exception for vessels expired in 2004? Has an export or transfer authorisation ever been sought for any Naval Service vessel or Air Corps aircraft sale? What statutory power does a Minister exercise when selling a warship?

They belong to Revenue, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority and the Department of Defence. Putting them is the next piece of work rather than this one.

Sources

This piece reflects independent analysis. The author writes in a personal capacity.