TWO Fianna Fáil cabinet ministers have been asked to stand up in front of the party's TDs and senators to explain the "e-voting fiasco", the Sunday Tribune has learned.

South Tipperary backbench TD Mattie McGrath has tabled a motion for the weekly parliamentary party meeting asking former environment ministers Noel Dempsey and Martin Cullen to account for the €51m waste of taxpayers' money caused by the purchase of the defunct e-voting machines.

John Gormley, the environment minister, announced his decision to scrap the machines on 23 April, saying the cost of adapting the machines to make election results verifiable would come to another unjustifiable spend of €28m.

"Since the day minister Gormley announced the machines were going to be scrapped, I have had a motion down with the parliamentary party calling on the party leadership to explain the e-voting fiasco, said McGrath.

"I am not happy with the way the whole issue was handled. It looks as if the senior officials did not handle the procurement issue correctly and no proper value-for-money audit was carried out. This can be seen with the signing of storage contracts for 20 years when the machines are not meant to even last that long.

"The buck stops with the minister so I am calling on the leadership to take action. We can't walk away from this. If you or I bought something we would have a warranty, yet the government bought something that was clearly defective yet they don't seem to have any comeback.

"I can't believe there has to be a way of adapting them, unless they were complete rubbish. They should be able to adapt them for schools."

A spokeswoman for Fianna Fáil said that the party would not comment on any parliamentary party motion ahead of it being heard at a given meeting.