Taxpayers face €9.2m bill for Cullen advisers

MARTIN CULLEN spent over €9 million on outside experts during his time as Environment Minister.

Mr Cullen’s former election campaign manager, Monica Leech, was paid €11,200 per month as a PR adviser, most notably on e-voting.

The details of the current Minister for Transport’s expenditure of €9.2m on consultants follows the disclosure last week that Micheál Martin spent over €30m on 145 reports during his time at Health.

Non-civil service staff and advisers were also paid just over €1m from June 2002 to September 2004.

Details of the payments, disclosed in a parliamentary question to Fine Gael spokesman Bernard Allen, show that €3.8m was spent on advertising and publicity campaigns and another €425,000 on electronic voting testing.

Yesterday, an Environment spokesman said it was the policy to engage consultants only where they can contribute specific, specialised skills or “where it is considered necessary to obtain an external independent evaluation”.

He also defended the spend on e-voting experts as “fully justified” by providing cost savings and other benefits.

Last night, Mr Allen said the cost of e-voting testing, in particular, was yet more money down the drain on that project as the machines will never be used.

“In general, there seems to be an over-reliance, an overuse, of consultants by ministers at huge expense to the taxpayer,” he said.

Payments totalling €303,000 were made over a 27-month period for “communication consultancy” to Monica Leech Communications, the company run by the minister’s former general election campaign manager.

Yet Mr Cullen’s politically appointed staff also included a special adviser, a press officer and a personal assistant.

The status of Ms Leech within the department was highlighted earlier this year when it was revealed that the minister’s personal adviser sat on the interview panel that awarded the controversial €4.7m electronic voting publicity contract to a company described as “friends of Fianna Fáil”.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said at the time that the granting of the contract to the consortium headed by Q4 Public Relations, run by former FF general secretary Martin Macken and former Government adviser Jackie Gallagher, was completely transparent.