State pays €1m on fees for children of overseas staff

The State is paying over €1m a year to fund the private education of the children of foreign affairs staff posted overseas.

Details have emerged of a range of allowances paid across the public service which are under review by Brendan Howlin, the public expenditure and reform minister.

Among the payments are a €444-a-year clothing allowance to staff in the Government press office who also receive an “on-call” allowance of five hours’ overtime at double time every week.

Personal assistants to highly paid Government advisers receive annual allowances of €7,125.

The Department of Foreign Affairs provides a range of allowances to staff posted overseas. Last year, it paid:

* €1m in vouched school fees for 76 children of 46 staff;

* €709,000 in an unvouched “child foreign allowance” for 224 children of 128 officers;

* €811,000 for health insurance top-ups for 318 officers and 335 dependents;

* €8m in rent allowance;

* €5.5m in “local cost allowance” which covers costs arising from representative roles and for people serving in “hardship” posts;

* €2.4m in untaxed “cost of living allowance” for 325 staff to “defray costs associated with living in cities where the cost of living is higher than in Dublin”.

In the Department of the Environment, 22 workers shared €40,000 for having an office in their home, and two shared €1,000 for “eating on site”, according to the figures provided in response to parliamentary questions from Fianna Fáil’s Sean Fleming.

Mr Howlin has asked each department to present business cases for each of the 800 allowances available across the public services which amount to €1.5bn a year. He recently told an Oireachtas committee that some cases were adequate while others were “rather inadequate”.

He will present a memo containing these cases, along with recommendations, to the Cabinet before the summer recess.