I. INTRODUCTION The dissipative effects, including both bulk and shear viscosity, are supposed to play a very important role in the early evolution of the Universe. The first attempts at creating a theory of relativistic fluids were those of Eckart [1] and Landau and Lifshitz [2]. These theories are now known to be pathological in several respects. Regardless of the choice of equation of state, all equilibrium states in these theories are unstable and in addition signals may be propagated through the fluid at velocities exceeding the speed of light. These problems arise due to the first order nature of the theory, that is, it considers only first- order deviations from the equilibrium leading to parabolic differential equations, hence to infinite speeds of propagation for heat flow and viscosity, in contradiction with the principle of causality. Conventional theory is thus applicable only to phenomena which are quasi- stationary, i.e. slowly varying on space and time scales characterized by mean free path and mean collision time. A relativistic second-order theory was found by Israel [3] and developed by Israel and Stewart [4], Hiscock and Lindblom [5] and Hiscock and Salmonson [6] into what is called “transient” or “extended” irreversible thermodynamics. In this model deviations from equi- librium (bulk stress, heat flow and shear stress) are treated as independent dynamical vari- ables, leading to a total of 14 dynamical fluid variables to be determined. For general reviews on causal thermodynamics and its role in relativity see [7]. Causal bulk viscous thermodynamics has been extensively used for describing the dy- namics and evolution of the early Universe or in an astrophysical context. But due to the complicated character of the evolution equations, very few exact cosmological solutions of the gravitational field equations are known in the framework of the full causal theory. For a homogeneous Universe filled with a full causal viscous fluid source obeying the relation ξ ∼ ρ 1 / $^{2}$, with ρ the energy density of the cosmological fluid, exact general solutions of the field equations have been obtained in [8–12]. It has also been proposed that causal bulk viscous thermodynamics can model on a phenomenological level matter creation in the early Universe [8]. Exact causal viscous cosmologies with ξ ∼ ρ $^{s}$, s = 1 / 2 have been considered in Ref. [9]. Because of technical reasons, most investigations of dissipative causal cosmologies have assumed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) symmetry (i.e. homogeneity and isotropy) 2