Fás travel expenditure - Extravagance at taxpayers’ expense

The abuse of travelling expenses within the public service should not be any great surprise.

Rody Molloy, the director-general of the state training agency Fás, defended his company’s expenditure in an RTÉ interview yesterday.

Probably the most disturbing aspect of the interview was his attitude to the whole thing. He clearly saw nothing wrong with the behaviour of his executives. He was responding to questions in relation to exposures in a newspaper article as a result of information released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mr Molloy was accompanied by his wife on a number of trips, but he insisted that this did not cost the company extra because he was “entitled” to travel first class and he traded down and travelled business class with his wife. Mr Molloy noted that the amount of money involved was only a very small part of a budget of €1 billion. Of course, this related only to travel to the United States; the overall travel budget ran to more than €5.7m last year.

Mr Molloy seemed to see nothing wrong with trading down to have his wife accompany him. If business class was good enough for himself and his wife, surely it should have been good enough for him and the other executives of the company for any other travel as well. One would expect that an executive of an Irish public company would travel on an Irish airline. Aer Lingus has long since discontinued first class on flights to the United States, because there was clearly little demand for it.

What is good enough for the Irish people should be good enough for employees of the Irish people. There should be no question of any public official being “entitled” to first class travel in the circumstances.

The defence of the behaviour of other aspects of the recent revelations raises many questions. One issue related to a $410 bill at a beauty and nail salon in West Cocoa Beach, Florida.

This was essentially dismissed. Mr Molloy pleaded that he was not aware of the details of a presentation made to Minister Mary Hanafin of a glass barometer that Fás purchased for $437 in the United States and then paid a further $419 to ship back to Ireland.

There was also a $942 bill for a round of golf in Orlando. Another Fás executive, in 2003, charged the company €760 to bring his car to France on the ferry and bring it back the following month. There was $192.32 on one bill for room service at a Marriot Hotel in Houston, or $116 for a suitcase to bring home $472.25 worth of presents purchased in the United States. Pay for view movies charged at a hotel were dismissed as mere “chicken feed”.

It was depicted as somehow part of building up relations in the United States. Were these gross abuses unique to Fás, or were other public bodies engaging in the same kind of extravagance at the taxpayers’ expense?