O’Donoghue tops table with €28,842 over legal allowance

BIG spender John O’Donoghue used €17,000 worth of Oireachtas staff time in his three-week campaign for re-election last year.

The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, who topped the league for use of public funds, also told the Standards in Public Office Commission that he used €13,073 worth of Oireachtas envelopes and other stationery.

Mr O'Donoghue, who went into the election as outgoing justice minister, used €30,466 worth of manpower and materials from his publicly-funded Dáil and constituency offices during the campaign, which amounted to two-thirds of his total budget, and put him €28,842 over his legal allowance.

The commission issued guidelines for outgoing candidates as to how they should calculate the value of publicly-funded items, such as stationery, staff time, ministerial cars, stamps, photocopying and other services.

But yesterday's report reveals weaknesses in this method, as it was left up to candidates' election agents to do the mathematics, and the commission had to accept their results in good faith.

They did have to submit receipts to support all expenditure, public and private, but many of the submissions were incomplete either missing receipts and invoices or not satisfactorily explained.

The commission had to query about 75% of the material submitted on behalf of the 462 candidates and 10 national party election agents, who between them created a forest of paper which included about 9,000 pages of submissions and several hundred thousand invoices, all of which is available for public inspection at the commission offices in Lower Leeson Street, Dublin.

Commission spokesman Brian Allen gave some indication of the nightmare task he and his staff of 10 faced over the past five months as they tried to make sense of the figures.

"Some of the material was in an appalling state and we had to go back and pretty much start from scratch. Others were not so bad and others were almost right, but not quite."

This was despite officers from the commission spending 18 months travelling around the country to brief political activists and election agents on how to compile and present their spending statements.

A "very small number" of election agents are still being pursued to clarify aspects of their statements, the report revealed, but none were in control of budgets big enough to breach spending limits.

One election agent, Michael Dunphy, agent for John Halligan of the Workers Party in Waterford, failed to provide any statement. The matter has been referred to the gardaí for investigation.