The Week Gerard Craughwell
It’s time to hold the President to account for expenses
AFTER the collapse of our economy, and the €64bn Government bailout of the banks 10 years ago, every citizen of this country was subjected to harsh austerity measures.
We heard from unions that employed people were living in “income poverty”, and new entrants to the public sector encountered two-tier pay discrimination persisting to this day. Lives were broken through home repossessions, and generations yet to come have been saddled with an unprecedented level of debt burden.
The only small consolation to every man woman and child affected by a brutal austerity regime was a belief that we were “all in it together”. Harsh measures were reluctantly accepted as a personal sacrifice for overall public good, a kind of communal belt-tightening with widespread tax increases, pay cuts, hiring embargoes, systematic dismantling of our social welfare system and savage raids on our public pension pot.
But in truth we were not all in it together. At the highest echelons of our political system, the President – who is supposed to be “first amongst equals” – was not only immune from the long arm of State-sanctioned austerity measures, but actually enjoyed obscene levels of unvouched expenses and privilege.
Recently, the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC) revealed that the President, in addition to his annual salary €249,014, had received allowances of €317,000 a year.
The Comptroller and Auditor General advised the PAC that the President’s allowance, unlike every other political allowance, is not subject to audit controls. Neither is there any requirement to return unspent funds to the State.
I first raised the issue of presidential expenditure when I discovered that hotel rooms for a trip to Geneva by the President had cost thousands of euro. I then found that the office of the president is not subject to Freedom of Information legislation – so no questions could be asked. This was widely reported, and for the first time since the first presidential election in 1938, the public are now questioning the implications of unaudited expenses incurred by our head of state.
The silence around the €317,000 has been deafening. It’s extraordinary it did not come under scrutiny during the years when the Department of Public Expenditure was trawling every corner of the economy and every household purse looking for savings to rebuild the economy.
It was very disappointing to learn that the Áras, during a public sector hiring freeze, created new posts and exceeded pay rules. The President created a job for Kevin McCarthy, the man who drove him around the country for his election campaign in 2011, funded from a non-pay fund with the agreement of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, and an adviser to the President was granted a top-up of €20,000 on her €80,000-plus salary. All this at a time when many public servants did not earn €20,000 because of part-time work or zero-hour contracts.
We also learned of a €395,000 Áras fund for training, development and incidental expenses, of which €96,000 was spent on photographs and video. The more the spending is probed at Áras an Uachtaráin, the more the disconnect with the citizens becomes apparent.
In the context of an overall presidential budget of €8m a year, €317,000 might seem insignificant, but it’s not. It might have purchased a week’s groceries for 3,170 families or paid for two family homes or several special needs assistants.
People say that drawing attention to these things is bitterness, and that I have an axe to grind. I don’t. I am just bitterly disappointed that we didn’t ask before now, that we didn’t become aware of this until the middle of a presidential election when little or nothing can be done.
What we can do is make things different in future, put in place an audited, transparent and accountable system and maybe even review the need for large presidential expense accounts at all.
The office of the President is not subject to Freedom of Information law – so no questions could be asked