Ministers abroad - Travel costs must be justified

BACKBENCH Dáil deputies and senators from 17 different Oireachtas committees spent over €400,000 on 87 different trips abroad from January 2006 to January 2007, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Officially the politicians were going to conferences or they were “on fact-finding missions”. Until evidence is produced to justify those trips, nobody should be deceived into thinking that most were other than junkets at the taxpayers’ expense.

If anyone working for a properly-run company were going on such journeys, they would have to justify the expenditure with a report explaining the benefits of the exercise and detail the information picked up that would be of benefit to the company. It should be no different for politicians. It is important that there should be no suspicion that taxpayers are just being ripped off.

More and more companies are resorting to modern technology to limit the amount of foreign travel by employees. We are now in the Information Age in which an enormous volume of information can be transmitted around the world in an instant. Instead of sending employees abroad, well-run companies are using conference calls on computers to allow people to discuss matters face-to-face from different continents.

In politics, the opposition is supposed to keep an eye on the Government, but in the case of these foreign trips, members of the opposition are invited along, too. The whole thing thus becomes like a cosy arrangement with little or no proper accountability in the sense of justifying such expenditure.

The stated purposes of the trips ranged from a study of drug policy in Santiago, Chile, to an examination of best practices on human rights in Japan, to a study of running charities and the promotion of alcohol in New Zealand.

Three deputies and a senator on the Joint Committee on Enterprise and Small Business had the dubious distinction of running up the biggest bill for a nine-day trip to the United States last June. That cost €32,925 for what was described as “fact-finding visit relating to reforms to the Irish Insurance Market”.

The second most expensive trip was undertaken by a similar group, who spent €26,912 on an Australian trip “investigating areas of concern” in relation to breath testing. Could any aspect of those trips not have been covered by conference calls on their computers? An overnight trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, for an inquiry into small farms cost €1,779, and a one-day trip to Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, for the same purpose cost €1,371.

Former Minister Michael Woods topped the list of most frequent flyers as chairman of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs. He made nine trips to Rwanda, Vienna, The Hague, Macedonia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Helsinki, Washington and New York at a cost of €20,074.

If deputies wish to go away on holiday, they should pay for it themselves, like everybody else. If they wish to travel on taxpayers’ money they should provide demonstrable proof of value for that money.