Category: Expenses

Luxury rugs, cars and a juicer rental: How the DFA spent taxpayer’s money in 2017

TWO rugs together costing over €6,200, a €5,000 contribution towards sculpting a bust of a former diplomat, renting a juicer for Prince Charles, and €32,500 for a luxury car were just some of the ways the Department of Foreign Affairs spent taxpayer’s money last year.

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Politicians trip to Hong Kong and China cost €27,000

 

Intersection of Yee Wo Street and Hennessy Road at night, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov. Source: Wikimedia Commons

MORE than €27,000 was spent sending five politicians and three officials on a week-long trip to China and Hong Kong.

The entire delegation flew business class at a cost of at least €2,712 each and stayed in a string of five-star hotels, most of which were generously paid for by their Chinese hosts.

Continue reading “Politicians trip to Hong Kong and China cost €27,000”

Oireachtas travel costs exceed €120,000 over past seven months

By Ken Foxe

TDs and Senators have run up an overseas travel bill of more than €120,000 during the past seven months.

Politicians jetted off to the four corners of the globe clocking up hundreds of thousands of air miles on trips to Iran, Russia, Canada, the United States, and Mozambique.

One senator Ronan Mullen made three expense claims totalling almost €1,800 on three separate one-night trips to France, according to the records, and despite the fact hotels and flights on the trip were paid directly by the Oireachtas.

Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl was away on separate trips to St Petersburg, Helsinki, and Washington DC. His counterpart in the Seanad, Cathaoirleach Denis O’Donovan, jetted off three times to Iran, Georgia, and the USA.

Just over €9,100 was spent on flights to bring five parliamentarians to Iran for a “bi-lateral” visit last October.

Read the expenses document below.

Expense claims by Environment Minister’s drivers

This is another meta FOI. This one details claims made by the ministerial drivers of Alan Kelly, Phil Hogan, Paudie Coffey and Jan O’Sullivan. Strangely, redactions were applied to the names of the drivers – the names are a matter of public record.



Who ran up a €1,600 bill ringing a single mobile number in Pakistan from the Oireachtas?

This story is by Ken Foxe and based on a recent story in the Mail on Sunday: Documents obtained under FOI are below.

A politican is suspected to have run up a bill of more than €1,600 calling a single mobile phone number in Pakistan, an unpublished Oireachtas memo has claimed.

Officials in Leinster House’s telecoms unit estimated that calls to a ‘very small number’ of foreign numbers were costing the taxpayer at least €14,000 per year.

Other costs included an estimated €1,249 bill for calling a mobile in Australia, €581 to a mobile in Lithuania, €381 to a Maltese mobile, €370 to a UK mobile, €366 to a South African landline and €331 to a landline in Cyprus. The officials admitted they were powerless to establish whether the expensive calls – made in 2010 – were legitimate as they don’t track who TDs and Senators call on their taxpayer-funded phones.

But the memo stated it was ‘difficult to imagine’ how they could be genuine. ‘It is difficult to imagine what Oireachtas business would give rise to calls costing €1,621 to a single Pakistani mobile phone number, and it would be irresponsible to consider the possibility that such calls might have been an unintended/improper use of the service provided. Without availabe data it is not possible to make any judgement on the matter.’

The discoveries were made after a report was commissioned following the ‘Ring of Kerry’ controversy in which a €2,639 bill was run up dialling a premium phone line to vote for Michael Healy-Rae, who was a contestant in the Celebrities Go Wild TV show.

That led directly to a ban on calls to premium rate numbers from all Oireachtas phones and immediately eliminated any potential for abuse. These unpublished memos, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, were prepared internally but never sent forward for consideration by spending watchdogs.

The Oireachtas has confirmed they are now planning a review of telephone services to look at the risk ‘of inappropriate use, or excessively expensive use of telecoms facilities. However, tackling the problem of politician’s personal phone bills has proven difficult because of the cloak of secrecy that surrounds them.

The Oireachtas operates a screening process for calls and if civil servants, and other similar staff, run up excessive bills – the costs are immediately red-flagged. But this screening does not apply to TDs or Senators, which means inappropriate use of phone facilities can never be investigated.

There is a proviso on the above figures in that they are based on seven months of usage, with a twelve-month figure extrapolated from the January to end July cost.

Original documents:



Office of President expenditure at Waterford IT

This is a report carried out by Deloitte & Touche into €3.7 million worth of expenditure by the Office of the President of Waterford Institute of Technology. It was released by the Higher Education Authority under Freedom of Information legislation along with the response drafted by the college.



And the response drafted by the university:



Political pensions: The costs

Political pensions and lump sums for former TDs, Ministers and Senators have cost nearly €2 million every single month over the past year and a half.

An estimated €32.7 million has been spent by the Oireachtas and Department of Finance since January 2011 on pensions for former politicians. The cost includes more than €9.5 million paid in lump sums to the record number of public representatives who retired after the last election. A further €1.5 million was paid out in termination lump sums with another €3.24 million given out in ‘termination payments’.

In total, once-off payments came to €14.35 million with a further €12.68 million paid on actual ongoing pension payments. A detailed breakdown of expenditure, which was first obtained by the Irish Mail on Sunday, shows that €371,234 has been paid out by the Oireachtas every single week since January 2011.

Around €5.2 million has been paid out during the same period in Ministerial pensions with a further €515,540 paid out in ‘severance’ payments. When the Department of Finance payments are taken into account, the weekly cost to the taxpayer has been €449,757 over the past seventeen months.

Many familiar names are in receipt of sizeable state pensions including Ivor Callely, Padraig Flynn and Ray Burke.

Expenditure by the Department of Finance on pensions is contained in the following parliamentary question.

This is the FOI request and a breakdown of the figures:



John Perry's enormous mileage claims

Small Business Minister John Perry managed to claim almost €30,000 in mileage expenses in less than 11 months.

The Fine Gael TD even managed to claim for 4,417kms in a month in which only two official appointments are listed in his diary. The Minister had an engagement in Wexford and one in Tuam, which is just a short drive from his home in Ballymote, Co Sligo.

Asked how the mileage was run up in a period in which the Dail and many government offices were closed, his Department said he had taken no holidays that month. They also said much of the mileage had been run up driving between his three constituency offices in Co Sligo.

In July of last year, the Minister made a claim for 8,722kms, which works out at 281kms per day. Mr Perry’s home in Ballymote is 192kms from the Dail, with a driving time of two and a half hours. To put it in perspective, that claim was the equivalent of a round trip to Wexford every single day, including weekends.

In the month of September, the Minister made a claim for 7,588kms despite the fact that at least nine days of the month were spent abroad (in Australia, the UK & Belgium). For the remaining days, his claim works out an average of 344kms per day, the same as a round trip to Belfast every single day, including weekends and the Bank Holiday. This level of mileage would require the Minister to have spent around four hours of each day in his car.

At the most fundamental level, it is very difficult to see how a tax-free sum of €29,782.35 can possibly be required to keep a car on the road for less than a year.

The Department of Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation issued a lengthy statement on the matter to the Irish Mail on Sunday at the weekend:

‘While the Dail was not in session during the whole month of August, Minister Perry continued to carry out his duties and work commitments as an elected representative for his constituency of Sligo/North Leitrim and as Minister for Small Business.

‘Due to work commitments, and to enable the Minister to fulfil his constituency obligations, Minister Perry did not take any holidays during the month of August.

‘In his role as a public representative for the constituency of Sligo / North Leitrim the Minister has three working constituency offices based in Ballymote, Tubbercurry and Sligo. The Minister operates clinics for his constituents in these offices and travels between them very frequently. In his role as Minister for Small Business he has also met with members of the business community from the region at his offices in the Constituency.

‘During the months of July, August and September – just like in every other month since being appointed Minister of State – Minister Perry has covered long distances within his constituency, between his constituency and Dublin, and all around the country in order to balance his duties as Minister of State with representing and meeting his constituents.

‘Details of the Minister’s constituency engagements and his engagements as a member of a political party were not released as part of the Freedom of Information request as these records are exempted from release.

‘It would not be unusual for Minister Perry to drive to and from Dublin, as well as to undertake other trips in the same day.

‘Mileage paid to Ministers of State is strictly based on mileage driven, and odometer readings are provided to the Department at the beginning and end of every month.’

Here are the documents: