Tales from Talbot Towers

Between 2002 and 2005, the Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue and his wife Kate-Ann ran up an overseas travel bill of nearly E175,000.

Travel on board the government jet cost a similar amount and added to their travel in 2006 and 2007 the total bill for those five years came to more than E550,000.

As promised, these are the documents from the second round of the Freedom of Information request, which show how much was being spent on flights, hotel, car hire, subsistence and so on.

They are remarkable by their lack of detail compared to the first tranche of information issued to the Sunday Tribune late in July.

But, they also offer a stark illustration of just how much money was being spent from the day that John O’Donoghue took office.

2002

2003

2004

2005

Twenty four hours after we got this information, the Sunday Tribune was issued with a legal letter by John O’Donoghue’s solicitors.

In it, he said that the newspaper had “fundamentally misled” the Irish public in relation to his expenses.

A few days later, he made his first “apology” to other TDs. Two days after that, he finally said sorry.

The Sunday Tribune has appealed the second FOI decision on the basis that the information provided in the second request is far sparser than that of the original.

Anyway, the last document relates to the justification of this from the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism [Part 1 and Part 2].

So John O’Donoghue has finally spoken [well put pen to paper] and admitted that travel expenses run up by himself and his wife Kate-Ann “appeared” to be high.

In reality, they “appeared” high because they were high … incredibly high.

During the course of his five years in office at the Department of Arts, Sport & Tourism, he and his wife amassed a travel bill of AT LEAST E550,000 during dozens of trip abroad.

That figure covers the cost of flights, hotels, the government jet and all the various other incidentals involved in Ministerial travel.

I drive home the words AT LEAST because significant chunks of his travel bill were picked up by state agencies, particularly Tourism Ireland, Horse Racing Ireland and the Irish Film Board.

To get access to those documents will require an investment of thousands of euro. Tourism Ireland for instance are seeking E1,600 in “search and retrieval” fees while the other two bodies are likely to want something similar.

As I’ve said before, if any millionaire out there has some spare cash burning a hole in his/her pocket, feel free to contact me.

I only deal in vouched expenses and it could well be a worthy investment

Anyway, the latest round of documents released to the Sunday Tribune show flights to China costing E9,000, an even bigger bill of more than E10,000 for car hire during the Cheltenham festival, and various other expenditure that “appears” very high.

Unfortunately, we have not been provided with the same level of detail in this second FOI, compared to the original one from two months ago, which has been posted in full over at Gavin’s blog.

By way of explanation, the first FOI yielded around 150 pages, with very high levels of details including emails, flight itineraries, hotel bills and even copies of subsistence claims.

The second FOI – despite costing four times as much – yielded a total of just FOUR pages, basically a table of expenditure by the Minister over a four year period, one page for each year.

We don’t know what hotels he stayed in, what class of flight was used, what car hire firm was tasked with the VIP transport and what a few thousand euro in “miscellaneous” expenses even are.

I plan to publish these documents later on in the week when I have time and at the same time pass them over to The Story to add to the bank of information they are trying to put together over there.