IVOR CALLELY has brought disgrace on the Seanad because of the way in which he blatantly manipulated travel and subsistence expenses and his colleagues have only themselves to blame for facilitating an arrangement by which unvouched and untaxed expenses inflated the incomes of all Oireachtas members. Abuse of those arrangements over many years amounted to a low-level public scandal. Even now, within a partially reformed allowances and expenses system, unvouched arrangements persist and are open to abuse.
As might be expected given his previous record, Mr Callely has sought to defend himself on the basis that there were “anomalies in the expenses regime”. So there were. In the past, some greedy TDs and Senators established unethical precedents. It was only a matter of time before such “anomalies” would be used to gouge the State for every possible penny. Unfortunately, Mr Callely is not the only individual at Leinster House who claimed travelling expenses from one location while having a permanent residence in another. That would explain his request that the Seanad’s Committee on Members’ Interests examine the matter. Containment, rather than any further exposure of wrongdoing, is the political imperative.
The behaviour of Mr Callely harks back to the bad old days when Fianna Fáil was mired in scandal and the only yardstick of conduct recognised as relevant was the criminal code. If a law didn’t explicitly forbid an action, or if exposure was improbable, politicians carried on and feathered their nests. Party leaders and senior ministers appeared to believe that moral principles and ethical behaviour constituted some sort of dangerous viral infection. Mr Callely has obviously learned nothing from those corrosive events. Five years ago, he was forced to resign as Minister of State because he had accepted a significant, undeclared benefit from a major construction company. At the time, he claimed he had done nothing wrong. He was forced to resign by then taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
Given this clear absence of a moral compass and the acute embarrassment caused to the government at the time it was extraordinary that, less than two years later, Mr Ahern should send Mr Callely to the Seanad as a personal nominee. There, he set about exploiting “anomalies in the expenses regime”. He claimed more than €80,000 in travel and subsistence expenses from his holiday home in west Cork to Seanad Éireann over a two-year period, even though his primary residence and constituency office remained in Dublin North Central. Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Fianna Fáil have moved to distance themselves from this unsavoury episode by proposing the expulsion of Mr Callely in advance of a formal investigation of the matter by his colleagues.
What is needed is a thorough and public examination of the issues by the Seanad Committee on Members’ Interests and the introduction of whatever changes are required to reassure the public that its money is being properly spent. Senator Callely should be asked to resign.