McGuinness ties himself in knots over travel expenses controversy

JOHN McGuinness is the latest TD to be undone by that highly contagious, and extremely debilitating, political affliction, entitlement.

The chronic condition manifests itself in politicians as soon as they are elected and get their first sniff of power. Unless regularly treated, with liberal doses of accountability and transparency, pretty soon you have a ministerial megalomaniac on your hands.

Mr McGuinness was barely in his junior ministerial office a wet week in 2007 before he was displaying stage 5 symptoms of the disorder: a pig-headed refusal to listen to reason, an absolute conviction in the superiority of his own unquestionable wisdom and egregious displays of prodigious pomposity.

According to the erstwhile minister, having his wife attend trade functions abroad with him was a matter of grave national importance and he was seriously aggrieved by the witless pen-pushers in his department who had the temerity to think otherwise. Having tried, and failed, to convince dubious departmental officials of the merits of his vision, he sent an angry email outlining his displeasure.

“I am entitled to some comforts while on State business, and an important one, in my case, is having my partner by my side,” he fumed.

The reasons why remain unclear. Maybe he needed someone to mop his brow when he emerged from a particularly gruelling meeting, or whisper rousing words of encouragement in his ear in the morning before he headed off to do battle with some bureaucrat in Brussels, but he was adamant that he wanted his wife with him.

While Mr McGuinness accepted that his senior minister, Micheál Martin, thought the practice was unethical, the Kilkenny TD invoked two higher moral authorities in his defence — Nietzsche and Proust.

“[Mr Martin] could be mistaken. Nietzsche says morality is the herd instinct of the individual and Proust says one becomes moral as soon as one becomes unhappy,” he mused.

As thrilled as civil servants must have been to have the usual banality of expense queries raised to such an elevated degree of philosophical erudition, one imagines they must have been somewhat perplexed by the reference to Proust. After all, if one becomes moral as soon as one becomes unhappy, then the TD, given his extreme discontentment, must surely have been among the most moral ministers in the then Government. Interestingly, Proust is best known for his seminal work À la Recherche du Temps Perdu — In Search of Lost Time – which is what we’re all doing now after 13 years of disastrous Fianna Fáil leadership. It is also notable that the TD’s philosophical insight, about the dangers of a herd mentality in the party, was confined to making a case for his wife’s travel expenses and was nowhere in evidence in Dáil debates at the time as the economy was going over a cliff.

Abandoning abstract philosophical arguments, the Fianna Fáil TD said he was willing to pay for his wife’s travel expenses if he had to, but said there was “a strong case to be made for the State paying despite the costs that such a position would generally create across departments”, adding that he was “perfectly happy to state my case … and defend the State for doing so”.

This desire to state his case for paying the foreign travel expenses of ministers’ spouses had waned somewhat by the time Mr McGuinness appeared on Morning Ireland on Monday to answer questions about the farrago. Asked on a number of occasions why the State should fork out for ministers’ spouses, he eventually mumbled that there could be “family grounds, health grounds or business grounds”.

“Can we afford not to do it in terms of trade missions and promotion of Ireland abroad?” he blurted, when asked if the State could really afford such largesse.

I like to imagine a deafening chorus of 450,000 people, listening around the country, all shouting YES at their radios as he nonchalantly dropped that rhetorical bombshell.

Perhaps I need to study Proust in more depth, but I fail to see how sending ministers’ spouses traipsing all over the globe, and having them twiddling their thumbs while their partners attend meetings, leads to the promotion of Ireland as anything other than a profligate basket case.

This may come as news to Mr McGuinness, but, thanks to his Government, there are thousands of families all over the country in which partners, who have had to emigrate for work, don’t see each other for weeks or months on end and have to rely on Skype to remain in touch.

Instead of landing the taxpayer with the added expense of paying for his wife to travel, maybe Mr McGuinness could show some semblance of solidarity by bringing his laptop on State-sponsored junkets.

In Mr McGuinness’ defence, family is very important to him. We know this because a veritable cottage industry sprung up in the McGuinness household after his election in 2007 when his son came to work for him. In fact, his son, Andrew, claimed the most overtime of any ministerial aide in the past six years, pocketing a total of €48,000, on top of his annual salary of €42,000, in the two years he held the position.

Now, with calls for Mr McGuinness to resign the chairmanship of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), following these embarrassing revelations, the question that must be asked is, does any of this matter? The Fianna Fáil TD is not the only one in Government buildings to look after a loved one following his election, as the appointment of 72-year-old former Fine Gael advisor, Seán Donlon, to the board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, on a salary of €164,000, earlier this month shows.

UNFORTUNATELY for Mr McGuinness, despite the blatant hypocrisy of the Government TDs now calling for his head, he has made something of a career out of being holier-than-thou. Having painted himself as the scourge of public sector waste — at various times describing civil servants as “rotten to the core”, having a “corrosive culture”, making “Faustian pacts” with ministers (all except him, it seems) and “danc[ing] to the sound of EU money tinkling into the national till” — the revelation that he was once a proud proponent of just such waste is very damaging.

Crucially, his consistent denigration of the public service is beginning to look more like petty point scoring than any personal commitment to best practice. His insistence that he is the victim of some kind of Machiavellian government plot, to get rid of him and thwart a banking inquiry, also rings hallow when one considers that any such inquiry will be into the last Government and not the current one.

Meanwhile, the current turf war raging between the Finance Committee and the PAC, about who is best placed to hold the inquiry, will no doubt continue to rage in his absence. Mr McGuinness prefers to blame sinister conspiracy theories for his current woes but the truth is more prosaic. He has, by now, been hoisted so far by his own petard that it remains to be seen if he can ever safely return to earth.