Their expenses are far greater than their contribution to the nation

AT a casual glance, it appeared to be the usual list from the revenue commissioners, naming and shaming the publicans, parish priests and assorted others who are conscientious objectors to paying their tax.

Required gloating though such lists are, this particular one was enough to make your average taxpayer go even more ballistic. It was a report of the exorbitant expenses claims by our revered members of the Dáil and Seanad.

Like most people I realised they were entitled to expenses, but never anything like the €14m we handed to them last year.

According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, we paid out €10.9m in expenses to TDs and another €2.67m to senators.

That was on top of the basic salary for TDs, which ranges from €80,024 to €85,589 per annum, depending on their years of service if you were gullible enough to describe it as a service.

For many of them silence is golden, and if there's such a thing as a vocal chord transplant, there is a plentiful supply of them in mint condition in the Dáil.

For many of them, the expenses they claimed amounted at least to, and in some cases more than, their salaries.

For example, Donal Moynihan, Fianna Fáil TD for Cork North West, drew an incredible €94,273, which put him in second place in the league of TDs' expenses. Some of that was backdated arrears relating to his constituency office since 2002.

In first place, however, was Fine Gael's Denis Naughten. The Longford-Roscommon TD collected a whopping €103,083.76, although this included €43,000 in office grants and office maintenance going back to 1997.

Actually, it's only when you glance down through the list of the TDs that you realise how few of them are recognisable and their level of expenses are just as unfamiliar to the rest of us.

Would names like Mae Sexton of the PDs (€79,171), FG's Padraic McCormack (€69,498) or Independent Finian McGrath (€37,681) ring any parliamentary bells for you?

It would be quite understandable if, on reading the list, somebody mistook the Seanad for a travel agency.

The biggest recipient here for expenses was Fianna Fail's Senator Brendan Daly. On a salary of €59,912 he got another €91,413 in exes. (But then, he had to travel to Paris, Strasbourg, Brussels, Berlin, Luxembourg and Cyprus).

By the way, Senator Daly also received a ministerial pension of €33,297 last year. His party colleague, Senator Rory Kiely, was a close second to him in the expenses league, but he spread his wings a bit further in his travels. He got €84,034, but he made it to Boston, Athens and France. I don't know who got the most air miles.

In any event I don't think the contributions of any of them to parliamentary debates have been responsible for the felling of too many trees to record their expensive thoughts in the Dáil records.

Abroad, as well, Irish parliamentarians are keeping the flag flying, as an Austrian MEP has revealed. Hans-Peter Martin conducted a two-year covert operation of his colleagues and discovered that five Irish MEPs have been claiming €262 daily allowance for Friday sessions which were never held. Another nine, he alleges, signed up for a daily parliamentary allowance on other days and then did a runner after spending less than an hour in the place.

Although she got €77,108.11 in Dáil expenses, it won't go far in helping poor Beverly Flynn out of the financial predicament she's in as a result of the Supreme Court rejection of her appeal in the RTÉ libel action which she lost in the High Court.

Even with her Dáil salary, she's still a fair few bob short of the €2m, at least, that she's facing for her day in court. In fact, it wasn't even a day. Ten minutes was all it took the five judges of the Supreme Court to deliver their unanimous findings that she had encouraged and assisted people to evade tax when employed by National Irish Bank. That worked out at about €200,000 a minute.

Bev has always maintained that she did nothing wrong while working with the NIB, but, understandably, that's a bit subjective.

Certainly, the Supreme Court failed to appreciate her dedication to duty and, in fact, the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Keane, made an observation that she won't be putting on an election poster.

In a devastating reference, he quoted a British law lord who had said that defamation law "affords little or no protection to those who have, or deserve to have, no reputation deserving of legal protection. I am satisfied the same considerations apply in this case".

TO judge from the reaction of Fianna Fáil in Mayo, this remark from the bench went totally over their heads because they are closing ranks around the ex-banker as she faces a motion to expel her from both Fianna Fail and the parliamentary party.

Obviously, Bertie Ahern has started taking his Weetabix because this week we saw him actually make a few decisions, a state of mind totally alien to our Taoiseach. First of all, he agreed that two ministers were out of line for using departmental material solely for Fianna Fáil purposes. Minister for Education Noel Dempsey should not have distributed confidential briefing notes from the departartment to his party's local election candidates. Neither should junior minister Frank Fahey have used official Department of Enterprise notepaper to invite business people to a Fianna Fail breakfast.

Then, in another benchmark decision, he put the gun to the head of circuit court judge Brian Curtin when he threatened him with impeachment.

Unless the judge either does you-know-what or gets off the bench, he faces the prospect of being impeached, something unprecedented here.

In the aftermath of the debacle of the judge's trial allegedly for accessing and downloading child pornography, even the vaguest possibility of him ending up with a fortune from the state is too offensive to entertain.

The latest decision by the Taoiseach himself to propose the motion to expel Beverly Flynn is one that is agitating the Soldiers of Destiny in Mayo to harbour thoughts of forming an independent republic.

For some perverse reason, if reason can be said to have been exercised, they are sabre-rattling about the move to dump her from Fianna Fail, despite the controversy she is embroiled in, and are critical of the Taoiseach for trying to do so.

Maybe, they have become accustomed to the erroneous belief prevailing in some quarters of the party that the laws of the land are for other people.

Whatever about the sympathy some people may feel towards her because of the massive legal bill she faces, the highest court in the land has delivered its judgement, unanimously, on the conduct of Beverly Flynn and there is no gainsaying that.

Talking of courts, Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries must have felt like she was living in a nanny state for the past few weeks.