Limo for Kenny and Sargent

Earlier this year the Irish embassy in London decided to invest €26,000 in a people carrier to cut down on limo-hire costs. The man most affected by this is Terry Gallagher whose company, Cartel Direct, earned €580,000 from the embassy since 2003. We ran a story on this a couple of weeks ago.

From the FOI we received and the PQ put in by Leo Varadkar we can see that of the €127,663 spent on limousines during 2007 Cartel was paid €115,642.20.

In 2008 the Irish embassy in London spent a further €101,000 on limos and €99,343.40 of this went to Cartel.

Following on from the mini-van purchase Cartel's earnings from the embassy have dropped from the €100,000 per-year range to just €5,394 so far in 2009.

Unsurprisingly Bertie Ahern, who had reason to be regularly travelling to Britain, and (of course) John O'Donoghue, our now ex-ceann comhairle, were the biggest users of the service.

What was surprising though was the fact that the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) picked up the tab of €2,953.40 for two Enda Kenny car hires. We asked Fine Gael about this and it said it sometimes booked limos through the Irish embassies. The usual practice was for the DFA to bill FG afterwards and FG would settle the bill.

Except this didn't happen for a bill of €2,265 for a three day St Patrick's day trip to London for Kenny in 2006. According to FG Kenny was visiting Irish emigrant groups and a food fare. The DFA, however, said it was never reimbursed. FG say this is because it wasn't billed but it is now in contact with the DFA to sort it out.

Considering that Leo Varadkar, in the IT story, slags the government for "squandering" money and paying "more for less" on limousine hire it's interesting to look at Kenny's unpaid bill.

FG may (eventually) pick up the tab for this but did Kenny really need to have his Mercedes limo on the clock for 33 hours over three days?

A copy of Kenny's 2006 limo bill which came to €2,265 (on 2006 rates) is here.

Fine Gael are not required to repay the other bill which came to €688.44 as Kenny was a guest of Bertie Ahern for the Taoiseach's address to the British houses of parliament.

Trevor Sargent's limo bills for two trips between Heathrow Terminals last November are here and here. As you can see the procedure was to ferry an embassy official out to Heathrow to meet the minister and guide him safely from one VIP lounge to another VIP lounge in a different terminal.

When everyone else was using normal gas guzzlers isn't it great that the DFA made sure Sargent had hybrid and bio-fuel cars to keep his carbon emissions between terminals to minimum? Very green indeed.

But what about the free bus?

ISS on international adoption in Vietnam

Last month Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children, announced that a decision on whether to continue negotiations with Vietnam over a new bi-lateral agreement on intercountry adoption would have to wait until the Irish government considered a new Unicef report.

This report was carried out by the International Social Service (ISS) on behalf of the UN body and a draft report was circulated to certain countries involved in adoption in Vietnam. We reported last August that ISS were critical of Helping Hands, the Cork based adoption agency, because of an alleged lack of transparency in the fees charged to couples. ISS was generally critical of the current Vietnamese system and recommended a suspension of all international adoptions from the Vietnam until 2011.

The report still has not been published by Unicef but prospective parents with plans to adopt from Vietnam are keen to find out what it says.

I may be able to put more up at a later stage but for now here are the "summary of key observations" from ISS. The full draft report is obviously much longer and goes in to more detail but I can't put any more up for the moment.

As it is in "draft" form it obviously may be changed before it's final publication, whenever that may be.