High-priced flights of fancy
THE old recruitment poster that told young men that if they joined the navy they would see the world has a modern equivalent in Ireland. The 2004 take on it should go something like this: Get elected to the Oireachtas, and even if you never graduate from the back benches, never fear, you will still see the world.
Early last month, the Irish Examiner revealed the extraordinary extent of foreign travel undertaken on behalf of the nation by our TDs and senators.
TDs and senators have participated in well over 200 separate foreign trips to over 60 foreign countries in the past two years. This year alone, TDs and senators have travelled on numerous occasions to the USA, most countries in the EU and in Eastern Europe as well as Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, Mexico, Brazil and Russia. Britain, the obvious port of call for comparison, hardly features at all, other than for meetings of the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body.
The Irish Examiner has established that foreign trips by backbench and opposition TDs and senators have cost some €1.25 million between the summer of 2002 and August 13 this year.
Moreover, the costs are likely to be in excess of this because some Oireachtas members are slow at submitting their expenses and full expenses claims had not yet been submitted for several of the trips taken this summer, including the controversial trip by seven parliamentarians to Australia in July.
The information, disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that non-Government and non-ministerial travel by back-bench and opposition Oireachtas members costs the taxpayer €800,000 per annum.
This was the cost for 2003, which is the only full calendar year since the Coalition returned to power in June 2002.
The list of top spenders is dominated by TDs and senators who are members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the Oireachtas members who attend meetings of the Western European Union.
All but four of the top 17 (John Bruton, Pat Carey, Michael Woods and Seán Ardagh) are members of one or other of these two bodies.
All of Bruton’s foreign travel, and the bulk of Carey’s, was to Brussels for numerous meetings on the Convention on the Future for Europe. Bruton attended 56 meetings in Brussels (often returning on the same day) while Carey attended 26. Carey also travelled to Sao Paulo, Croatia and Rome with Oireachtas Committees.
The third Irish parliamentarian who attended the Convention was Green Party TD John Gormley who attended 19 meetings at a cost of €13,091.
Surprisingly the list is dominated by two senators: FF’s Paschal Mooney and Brendan Daly, who are both members of PACE. Fine Gael’s Jim O’Keeffe is also a member, as is FF TD Noel Davern. However, Davern’s total includes trips to Washington with the Foreign Affairs Committee as well as the trip to Sao Paulo.
Michael Woods makes the list by virtue of his chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which by its nature is one of the bigger spenders on foreign travel.
Seán Ardagh, the chairman of the Joint Justice Committee and a member of the Public Accounts Committee, makes the list on the back of long-haul trips with committee delegations to Copenhagen, San Francisco, Melbourne and Canada.
He was also one of eight Irish parliamentarians who attended an Inter Parliamentary Union Assembly meeting in Chile. This trip cost the taxpayer €67,541, or an average of €8,442 each. The eight were: Ardagh, Senator Rory Kiely, Breeda Moynihan-Cronin, Pat Carey, Billy Kelleher, Tom Hayes, Senator Ann Ormonde and independent TD Paddy McHugh. (The figures supplied by the Oireachtas are for the total expenses of each trip: when more than one member travelled, the Irish Examiner averaged the costs to arrive at its estimate).
Foreign travel by Government backbenchers and opposition TDs and senators in the two years since the General Election have cost an average of some €6,000 per Oireachtas member. But in practice, only 120 of the 220 in both Houses have travelled because TDs from the Green Party (with the exception of Gormley’s work with the convention) and Sinn Féin have travelled on only a handful of trips.
A few distinct trends emerge from the figures, notably the apparently high number of trips that seem to include business class flights.
The rules governing travel set out that “scheduled flight-time of six hours or more constitutes long haul travel and entitles TDs and senators to business class tickets”.
However, to allow for “flexibility”, particularly the possibility of Oireachtas members being recalled from abroad at short notice for parliamentary reasons, it goes on to state that “members shall be entitled to travel business class or its equivalent on short and long haul flights”.
In effect, that gives travellers the licence to travel business class almost at all times. The evidence of the figures - most of the many two and three-day trips to Paris, Geneva and Strasbourg costing between €2,500 and €4,000 - is that most TDs avail of that get-out clause, opting for business rather than economy flights.
For example, a six-day trip to the USA by Labour TD Jack Wall in October 2002 cost a cool €7,107.92. He was attending a meeting of the defence committee of the Western European Union (WEU), at which Ireland has observer status. A five-day trip to New York by Jim O’Keeffe in November 2002 to attend a meeting of the political affairs committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) cost €6,660. Four members of the Foreign Affairs Committee travelled to New York in the same month to visit the UN (Ireland was on the Security Council at the time). The four were Michael Woods, Dan Wallace, Michael Noonan and Liz O’Donnell. Its total cost came to €20,890.
Each of the Oireachtas committees receive an annual budget for foreign travel. The average is circa €15,000, though the budget for the Foreign Affairs Committee for 2003 ran to over €5,000. As Green Party chief whip Dan Boyle has pointed out, there seems to be a tendency in each committee to spend its entire budget.
Committee members have globe-trotted far and wide at the invitation of other parliamentary committees, to attend worthy but not vitally important conferences, or on fact-finding missions to the Americas, South East Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe and to Russia, which a four-member delegation of the Arts, Sports and Tourism Committee visited to “research Russian sports, music and the arts”. The cost of that trip was €6,962, which was low in the scheme of things.
“There’s an expectation on each committee that they should travel each year. A pretext for a trip is created and they choose a destination without applying any strategic thinking to it.
“Certainly some of the trips that have been undertaken look more like junkets than genuine trips. I would argue that badly planned trips are unnecessary,” Mr Boyle said.
Independent South Tipperary TD Séamus Healy is outspoken in his opposition to delegations of TDs and senators travelling abroad.
“I believe a majority if not all of these trips are a waste of public money and I am opposed to them at local and national level,” he argued.
Only one Sinn Féin TD, Aengus Ó Snodaigh, has travelled abroad since 2002. That was a trip to Brussels which came to a lowly €652. The party says there are occasions when trips are justified but it argues that the vast majority of foreign trips undertaken at present are unjustified.
The predilection for foreign travel among parliamentarians seems to be a global phenomenon. The Irish Parliamentary Association, chaired by Ceann Comhairle Ruairi O’Hanlon, visits the parliaments of other countries and also attends conferences of the Inter Parliamentary Union. It also extends invitations to delegations of foreign politicians to visit Ireland.
There is a ‘contra’ agreement in place. The travelling politicians pay for their own flights but the host country pays for accommodation and internal expenses.
Between June 2002 and August 18 this year, the Irish Parliamentary Association (IPA) hosted eight delegations from America (three times), China, Uganda, Germany, Cyprus and Croatia at a cost of €70,000.
In addition to its trip to Chile, the IPA has sent delegations of TDs and senators to Iceland, Geneva, India, the USA, Copenhagen, Poland and Croatia, France, Portugal, Scotland, Mexico and Australia in the past two years. The costs associated with those trips amount to €234,000 to August this year. The costs do not take into account the cost of the contentious trip to Australia in July by the so-called ‘Shiraz Seven’ (Dr O’Hanlon, Sen Rory Kiely, Mary Hanafin, Liz O’Donnell, Bernard Durkan, Tony Gregory and Jim Glennon).
Membership of several key committees are keenly sought after by TDs and senators because they involve the considerable perk of frequent foreign travel. They include PACE, the WEU, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the European Affairs Committee.
The Plenary Sessions of PACE, in particular, seem to be staggeringly expensive.
The eight meetings held in Strasbourg between September 2002 and June this year have cost some €140,000 in travelling expenses, most averaging some €3,294 per TD or senator for four or five day meetings.
For example, a meeting between January 27 and 31, 2002, in Strasbourg cost the taxpayer €23,061. Seven members (Brendan Howlin, Pascal Mooney, Jim O’Keeffe, Noel Davern, GV Wright, Brendan Daly and Jim Higgins) attended, at an average cost of €3,294.
There are exceptions. Delegations from the Public Accounts Committee, chaired by John Perry, have travelled economy on long haul flights to Australia and Canada. But for the vast bulk of foreign travel, it does not take a genius to work out that our TDs and senators do not like travelling steerage, and would certainly never condescend to travel with Ryanair.
1. Sen Paschal Mooney (FF) €67,911
2. Sen Brendan Daly (FF) €56,002
3. Jim O’Keeffe (FG) €48,017
4. Noel Davern (FF) €46,713
5. Joe Jacob (FF) €44,985
6. Jack Wall (Lab) €34,565
7. John Bruton (FG) €34,558
8. Pat Carey (FF) €34,343
9. Michael Woods (FF) €33,838
10. Ned O’Keeffe (FF) €25,709
11. Tony Gregory (Ind) €24,388
12. GV Wright (FF) €22,792
13. Michael Noonan (FG) €22,763
14. B Howlin (Lab) €22,258
15. S Ardagh (FF) €21,106
16. Sen Jim Higgins (FG) €20,795
17. Sen A Ormonde (FF) €20,428
1. Eight TDs and senators attended Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly in Santiago, Chile at a cost of €67,541 or €8,442 each.
2. The following year’s event in Mexico has cost €31,171 so far between eight TDs (€3,896 each).
3. Jack Wall visited the USA for six days to attend a meeting of the Western European Union Defence Committee. It cost €7,104.
4. Jim O’Keeffe (FG) visited New York for four days to attend the Political Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). The trip cost €6,660.
5. A four-day meeting of the PACE in Strasbourg attended by seven TDs and senators cost the taxpayer €23,061 or €3,294 each.
6. Four members of the Foreign Affairs Committee attended a conference in Sao Paulo earlier this year. Cost €15,284 to date.
7. Three members of the Health Committee attended an AIDS conference in Bangkok. Cost €8,928.
8. MJ Nolan visited New Zealand on an invitation from its parliament’s agriculture committee: Cost €6,269.
9. Three of the committee on Members’ Interests visited Washington on a fact-finding mission. Cost: €14,483.
10. For members of the PAC visited Melbourne for a conference. They travelled economy but cost still came in at €18,605.
11. Four members of the Foreign Affairs Committee visited New York. Cost €20,890.
In 2003, two members, Noel Davern and Paul Bradford went as part of a delegation to meet the Ireland and US friendship group. That trip cost €11,480.
