Ex-senator Callely faces sentencing

Former junior minister Ivor Callely will be sentenced on Monday for fraudulently claiming mobile-phone expenses at Leinster House while he was a senator.

The case was adjourned to allow counsel for the DPP to make submissions on whether Callely’s former position as a senior politician is an aggravating factor in the case.

Judge Mary Ellen Ring put it to counsel that “a politician is a person inposition who in effect sets the legal parameters on which everyday people operate and when they offend against the legal parameters they effectively say, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’.”