Chief Whip paid €2k to her mother from special Dáil funds
...while her colleagues paid €570k for PR help or training
GOVERNMENT Chief Whip Regina Doherty paid her own mother more than €2,000 for ‘secretarial assistance’ out of a special allowance available to politicians.
The payment was made to her mother, Maria Dalton, last October through a single invoice that was issued for a total of €2,150.
The bill was part of more than €570,000 paid out by the Oireachtas through what is known as the special secretarial allowance.
It allows government ministers to pay for secretarial assistance, public relations advice, IT services, and for training.
TDs and senators also sometimes use it to hire temporary vouched employees on short-term contracts instead of choosing to hire full-time assistants.
Details of the payments, released following an FOI request, show that Ms Doherty spent €2,912.50 under the scheme, €2,150 of which went to her mother.
After two weeks of no response to a request for comment, the Irish Mail on Sunday approached Fine Gael TD Ms Doherty at her home in Ratoath, Co. Meath yesterday.
Junior ministers hired former FG councillor
She told the MoS her mother had been working unpaid for 20 years and now she was in a position to pay her. ‘The money was paid to my mother for the work she did… she has worked for me for 20 years for nothing. She’s worked for Fine Gael and this area for nothing and she now gets paid for a little bit of the work that she does in the office…Anybody that works in my office gets paid.’
On the allowance, Ms Doherty said it was new: ‘I only got it last year when I was made a minister. I probably wasn’t in a position to pay people beforehand and now I’m lucky to be able to pay them a few bob for the service they provide in the area.’
Junior ministers Damien English and Helen McEntee hired former Fine Gael Cavan councillor Seán McKiernan and his company Consilium Communications for secretarial services last year.
Mr McKiernan, who failed to win a Seanad seat last year, was paid, along with his company, a total of €18,200.
Mr English also paid €1,100 for public relations advice from Kevin Kinahan, a professional therapist and consultant hypnotherapist, from the Gold Clinic in Dublin. And junior minister Dara Murphy ran up a bill of €28,532 for PR advice from Dublin-based businessman Declan O’Leary and his firm T/A Media Mentor.
One of the frontrunners for the Fine Gael leadership, Simon Coveney, also ran up a PR bill in the early part of last year. He paid out just over €5,500 to Cork-based firm Cameo Communications.
As revealed last week, Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald also used the special secretarial allowance for PR advice. She paid just over €11,000 to the Communications Clinic owned by Terry Prone and her husband Tom Savage.
She also paid €2,400 to a firm called Latitude for ‘training’. More than €9,000 was paid out to PR firm PSG Communications on behalf of junior minister Patrick O’Donovan for advice last year.
And Fine Gael minister Pat Breen paid Claire Gallagher around €4,500 for PR services while minister Katherine Zappone hired Dr Michael O’Loghlen for PR help at a cost of €3,916.
The Oireachtas said the allowance could be used in two ways, for contracts for service or for temporary vouched employees.
A significant chunk of the €570,000 went on this type of employment, a cost that arises whether the staff are temporary or full-time. The Oireachtas said: ‘The purpose of the allowance is to assist towards expenses arising from the purchase of certain secretarial assistance, public relations, information technology (not web related) and training.
It also said that the allowance could be used to pay for secretarial services (temporary vouched employees)… and ministers can opt for an annual fully vouched allowance of €41,092.’
‘Tánaiste engaged Terry Prone’s company