Haughey blew budget on entertaining

FORMER taoiseach Charles Haughey was spending more than double his official entertainment allowance on wining and dining visiting dignitaries within weeks of his infamous “living beyond our means” speech.

Government files from 1980 released today by the National Archives show officials in the Department of Finance tried to rein in the taoiseach’s expenditure without success.

Alarm bells rang early in his first term when a lunch for then European Commission president, Roy Jenkins, cost three times the official limit.

Haughey’s officials asked Finance to cover the cost, explaining: “This excess arose due to general increases in the cost of catering and to the selection of a menu which was in keeping with the usual standards for such occasions hosted by the Taoiseach.”

“Every effort should be made in the future to keep expenditure of this kind within reasonable limits,” officials in Finance pleaded when one bill arrived showing £1,466 was spent on flowers alone for a reception for the newly appointed Archbishop of Armagh.

But Haughey paid no heed and also put them in a difficult position by entertaining official guests at his home in Abbeville, paying caterers out of his own pocket so they had no choice but to recompense him.

On January 10, 1980, a month after he succeeded Jack Lynch as taoiseach, Haughey delivered a grim and by now infamous televised state of the nation address in which he said that the level of government spending and borrowing could not continue.

But 1980 was also the start of new hopes for an end to the troubles in the North, as Haughey and his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher got to know and develop a mutual admiration for each other.

A briefing document from the Irish embassy in Britain prior to the pair’s first meeting advised Haughey that Thatcher was “sharp, bossy, down to earth and at times abrasive”.

“She sometimes gives offence to her cabinet by treating them as if she were an aggressive school-mistress.”