Irish Independent – Dublin,Ireland
Sunday October 11 2009
The ignominious fall of John O’Donoghue, the about-to-resign Ceann Comhairle and former Minister of Sport, has highlighted the remarkably loose standards that apply when Government ministers come into contact with the taxpayers’ money.
O’Donoghue has been hounded from office because of the lavishness of his personal expenses — more than half a million on travel, hotels, limos and dinners during his time at the Department of Sport, much of it spent so that he could watch horse races — but he was just as carefree with the money he spent on people other than himself.
While he was the minister in charge of distributing the Sports Capital Grants programme, O’Donoghue ploughed money into his native Kerry. His county had received just under €7m (€51 per head of population) while his predecessor Jim McDaid had been in charge of the funds; under O’Donoghue, Kerry received €18m (€134 per head of population, and proportionately far more than any other county).
He was looking after his own, just as McDaid had done for Donegal, and was happy to channel public funds into his own constituency and, of course, his local GAA club (St Mary’s got nothing from McDaid, but got €650,000 during O’Donoghue’s reign).
There was nothing secretive or underhand about the grants (like any politician, O’Donoghue was not shy about being associated with such largesse) and there was little outrage. That was the way the system worked: politicians could use the public’s money as they saw fit. Sports Capital Grants were invariably more generous, and more numerous, in election years and were disproportionately skewed towards the minister’s own constituency.
In a nod to where the money originated, the Minister for Finance’s constituency could also expect to benefit disproportionately, with both Kildare and Offaly doing well under Charlie McCreevy and Brian Cowen. Sports policy — the notion that hundreds of millions should be spent coherently in the pursuit of some measurable public benefit — did not apply. O’Donoghue, like McDaid before him, benefited from the spending, if only indirectly by buying him kudos and gratitude on his home turf.
O’Donoghue’s other major spending area was on horse and greyhound racing, which received hundreds of millions from his department. The original scheme was established by the Department of Agriculture but was enthusiastically embraced by O’Donoghue when it was shifted across to sport.
No matter what your view on the scale of the funding, at least there was a coherent policy in place. The Government believed that the Irish horse industry had the potential to be a world leader that employed thousands and brought prosperity to rural communities, so it was prepared to subsidise it. That, however, did not mean that the horse industry was expected to subsidise the minister in return.
It is astonishing that Horse Racing Ireland chose to pick up the tab for O’Donoghue as he visited racecourses around the world, spending €20,000 of the money that it had received from the taxpayer on his hotel bills.
If the minister’s travel was legitimate — as everyone claims it was — then his expenses should have been met by his own department. Spreading the cost to the HRI, or to Tourism Ireland, leaves the department and HRI open to the accusation that they were helping him conceal the true extent of his spending. More critically for HRI, it makes it look very foolish at a time when it is desperately trying to defend its funding from the state. The McCarthy report has recommended deep cuts in funding — much of which is spent on generous prizemoney — and the industry’s response to that threat has been strangely muted. Perhaps it was confident that negotiations with friendly ministers could salvage that funding, but the latest revelations have not helped. It is now inextricably linked to political scandal and inappropriate spending, allowing money it received from the public to be spent on the excessive desires of a minister whose favours it sought.
Racing, and sport in general, have suffered from O’Donoghue’s years in the Department of Sport and by the manner of his political downfall. His spending on sport, while lavish, was influenced not by policy but by politics while his expensive association with racing has damaged the sport’s standing as it faces serious threats to its public funding.
Sunday Independent
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