THE Department of An Taoiseach has written to Judge Michael Moriarty informing him that fees to the Moriarty tribunal legal team will be cut by 8%.

The correspondence is in line with last month's government decision to obtain annual savings of €80m through an 8% cut in all professional fees.

It is understood that the 8% reduction in fees will also hold for the Mahon tribunal.

The cut in fees will mean senior counsel at the Moriarty tribunal will face a pay cut of €200 a day on their current daily rate of €2,500, bringing their fees down to €2,300 a day. The daily rate for Mahon tribunal senior counsel, at €2,250, is slightly less and the reduction in their fees will be €180.

The higher rate for the Moriarty tribunal lawyers recently came under scrutiny following a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General that claimed senior counsel Jerry Healy and John Coughlan were offered €250 a day more than intended because of a typographical error on a document drafted by a government department.

The error added €1m to the legal bill of the Moriarty tribunal.

However, the two lawyers subsequently denied they were paid the higher fees because of a mistake – a stance reportedly backed by the Department of the Taoiseach on the basis that the increase to the higher fee of €2,500 was agreed in 2002 following negotiations.

Despite the government last year insisting that legal-team fees for the Mahon and Moriarty tribunals would finish at the end of 2008, the Moriarty tribunal looks set to run at least for the next few months.

A new round of public hearings in relation to its investigation into the awarding of the second mobile-phone licence is likely to begin in early April. This suggests that it will be the summer before the tribunal's final report is published – or even later, given the distinct possibility of further legal challenges to the tribunal.

Although the Moriarty tribunal threatened injunctions against newspapers that attempted to reveal details of its preliminary findings, it has been widely reported that those findings of the tribunal were strongly critical of senior civil servants and their handling of the mobile-phone competition.

Close observers are predicting "a lot of fireworks" when the public hearings resume.