Why are Michael D’s expenses kept secret?
THE conspiracy to keep the cost of President Higgins’s hotel expenses secret is much darker and more dubious than taxpayers forking out €3,000-a-night for his suite in Switzerland. And even more brazen was his office refusing for more than a month to acknowledge that the President had stayed in the five-star BeauRivage hotel.
Why, I wonder, was the Supreme Commander of the Irish Defence Forces, who publicly paraded his embarrassing views on Cuba and Venezuela, so coy about revealing his travelling expenses?
His office’s response to recent queries about the President’s expenses was an ill-concealed sense of entitlement rather than a forthright answer.
Back in April, President Higgins got angry and described a reporter’s questions about how he spends taxpayers’ money as ‘rather sad’.
And to me, the President’s petulant reaction to an enquiry about how he spends other people’s money smacks of ingratitude if not arrogance. The Government refuses to concede the same right in law for Irish citizens to view their head of state’s expenses that allows British subjects to know the cost of their royal family.
All records of presidential spending are specifically exempt from the Freedom of Information (FoI) laws. And last week the Minister for Public Expenditure, Paschal Donohoe, said there were ‘no plans’ to remove this exclusion for the presidency. This refusal is not based on any principle: it is rooted in the Fine Gael party’s self-interest when they backed President Higgins’s re-election to save them the €1m cost of running a candidate of their own.
A general election is hurtling towards the Government and the Taoiseach is making a virtue out of a necessity by presenting his support for President Higgins’s reelection as both prudent and patriotic.
But it is hardly patriotic to exempt the costs of the office of the President from public scrutiny. The FoI laws were extended in 2014 to include records in the gardaí, Central Bank and Nama – but the Office of the President was specifically excluded.
IN 2014, Fine Gael was in coalition with the Labour Party whose current leader, Brendan Howlin, was minister for public expenditure… and, of course, President Higgins was their candidate and a veteran member of Labour. When the extension of the FoI law was being debated, Mr Howlin said that it had always been the tradition to keep the presidency above politics. And therefore, said Mr Howlin, it would be ‘inappropriate to cover the Office of the Presidency under Freedom of Information.’
Presumably Mr Howlin and Fine Gael thought it appropriate to politicise the gardaí, Central Bank and Nama by making them accessible to FoI requests. When it comes to the presidency, the naked selfinterest and shameless opportunism of party politicians in and out of office is breathtakingly cynical – but hardly surprising.
The citizens of this Republic are entitled to transparency and accountability for the money they spend on keeping our head of state in the manner to which he has become accustomed.
But to be fair, the presidency is not this State’s only or most expensive indulgence: the office and those who have held it have served this country with distinction. As head of state, the President is entitled to use the government jet and stay in accommodation in keeping with the office he holds.
But it is unconscionable for the Government to exclude taxpaying citizens who pick up all of the President’s bills from knowing what they are paying for.