Jack Chambers' St Patrick's Day trip cost €29k and included double suite with private pool

The public expenditure minister and his three-person entourage visited Nigeria and Senegal

Minister for public expenditure Jack Chambers' trip totalled just over €29,000, some €13,000 of which comprised the cost of various flights.

Public expenditure minister Jack Chambers' trip to West Africa with a three-person delegation to mark St Patrick's Day cost €29,000, the Irish Examiner has learned.

The minister and his entourage visited Nigeria and Senegal last March.

One of the resorts in which Mr Chambers stayed cost the travelling party roughly €1,300 for the night, about €500 more per night than another hotel the group stayed in in Dakar, Senegal.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that Mr Chambers' double suite with private pool cost just over €300, twice the price of the rooms his entourage stayed in at the hotel on March 13.

Mr Chambers and the Department of Public Expenditure did not reply to a request for comment regarding the costs of the trip at the time of publication. However, it is understood that he had been unaware the room, which was booked as part of an Irish Aid trip, had come with a private pool, and had not made use of it. 

The minister's trip totalled just over €29,000, some €13,000 of which comprised the cost of various flights from Dublin to Senegal, and then on internally within Africa, together with seat assignments and access to the private lounge at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.

The minister's own flights came to €4,640, including premium economy tickets from Dublin to Dakar and returning from Lagos in Nigeria to Dublin. 

Premium economy is an interim level below business class.

The remainder of the group – Mr Chambers' advisers Sam Griffin and Niamh Kavanagh and principal officer within the department, Ken Cleary - travelled economy throughout the trip, apart from one business class flight for all four between Dakar and Abuja, Nigeria. 

Other expenses included €2,900 on an interpreter service for the four travellers in Dakar over four days, €150 on private car hire also in Dakar, and €6,400 for a four-night stay at two separate hotels in Nigeria.

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The trip took in appointments including the launch of an Irish aid-funded youth project in Dakar known as Yakaar Environment, a dinner with the Irish community in Senegal, and a visit to a Guinness production facility in Lagos, Nigeria.

The spend was far from the highest cost incurred by a departmental delegation during the annual St Patrick's Day diplomatic trips.

As of last April, the cost of flights for ministers visiting more than 50 countries during the diplomatic push was at least €142,000, and likely much higher given that figure was absent the final tallies from seven departments.

As of last April, the two departments that spent the most on flights were the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Higher Education, with the former spending €45,660 covering separate visits by three individual ministers.

The Department of Higher Education meanwhile spent €39,390 on flights for minister James Lawless and two officials to Australia.