TheStory.ie

The United States Secret Service spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on accommodation, vehicle rental, hard drive removal, and emergency vet care during the visit of President Joe Biden to Ireland with their “hub” hotel in Dublin getting paid more than €205,000 alone.

More than a dozen hotels across the country were booked for lodgings and conference space, with the Secret Service accidentally double-booking rooms at one luxury hotel at a cost of more than €3,000 after a breakdown in communications.

A log of expenditure details how hotels in Dublin 4 did particularly well, with the Clayton Burlington “hub” paid around €207,000, the nearby Herbert Hotel receiving an estimated €143,000, and the Conrad getting almost €70,000.

The largesse wasn’t confined to the Irish capital however, with hotels in Mayo, Sligo, and Galway picking up valuable business during Mr Biden’s visit to the west of Ireland.

Other costs included:

• Spending of €85 on “trash cans” and another €72 for “paper and tape” from Woodie’s DIY.
• A €6,810 bill with glaziers for security screens, €10,454 paid out to a company that specialises in elevator technology, and €1,800 spent on K Lifts for Dublin Airport.
• Expenditure of €142 for hard drive removal from a photocopier.
• A medical bill of €858 for veterinary services after a K-9 dog suffered “profuse vomiting”.

Personal belongings getting stolen from a court room, getting photographed outside the Criminal Courts of Justice, and bail money getting handed over to an ex-partner were among the complaints made to the Courts Service last year.

The service said they had received 207 complaints in 2022, although two of them related to people getting their picture taken while coming to or leaving court and could not be investigated.

Another 29 cases related specifically to judges while one case where somebody’s personal items were pilfered in a court room had to be referred to gardaí.

Dozens of complaints were also lodged on matters including delays in getting information, about solicitors and Courts Service staff, and family law cases.

The high cost and low availability of housing, as well as the amount paid out in personal tax by employees, were the single-most negative factors for major companies operating in Ireland, according to a controversial client survey carried out by IDA.

The generous Irish corporate tax environment, the subject of decades of controversy, was given as the highest-rated factor for operating in this country.

The reliability and availability of power was, ironically, given as the second most positive factor in the survey though the energy network has since been dogged by issues with supply alerts issued last year.

Release of the client survey, which was carried out in 2019, was fiercely resisted by the IDA who have spent at least €78,000 bringing a High Court challenge after being told they must release it under Freedom of Information laws by the Information Commissioner.

The IDA has since decided to disclose over sixty per cent of the report after originally making public fewer than a handful of pages.

A brief timeline of the IDA client survey case:

• March 2020: Right to Know requests a copy of the client survey.
• April 2020: The IDA releases three all but meaningless introductory and contextual pages from the survey.
• April 2020: Right to Know seeks internal review.
• May 2020: The IDA stands by its decision.
• Nov 2021: The Information Commissioner orders full release of the document.
• Dec 2021: The IDA appeals the decision to the High Court.
• Dec 2022: The Information Commissioner revokes it decision and agrees to make a fresh decision using a different investigator.
• Jul 2023: The IDA, without explanation, releases more than 60% of the survey, including all of its key findings.
• Aug 2023: It is revealed that the IDA has spent €78,000 on the case, despite having quietly conceded most of it. Legal costs incurred by the Information Commissioner (OIC) are not known.
• The case continues and a fresh decision from the OIC is awaited.

Advice given to forecasters in Met Éireann said Ireland needed to prepare itself for much heavier rainfall, storm surges and coastal flooding, as well as the growing “likelihood of extreme weather events”.

The climate guidance was sent to meteorologists in June amidst a summer of freak weather events globally including record-breaking temperatures, catastrophic flooding, and out-of-control forest fires.

The Met Éireann guidance said it was “beyond doubt” that human influence had warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and that temperatures here were up by approximately one degree Celsius since 1900.

It said this made extreme weather events more likely but that it was difficult to say how this would impact the frequency and intensity of storms in Ireland with further research needed.

The advisory said our climate had become significantly wetter with annual rainfall in the 1991 to 2020 period 7% higher than what was experienced between 1961 and 1990.

The document said: “Irish rainfall patterns are expected to change, with an increase in both dry periods and heavy rainfall events.”

It said there was “high confidence” that we could expect maximum rainfall rates to increase as the warmer atmosphere would carry more moisture.

The guidance added that a warmer atmosphere could be expected to carry 7% more moisture for every degree of warming with heavy rainfall events inevitably increasing in intensity.

It added: “Global sea level continues to rise. As a result, storm surge and coastal flooding risk around Irish coasts is expected to increase.”

Department of Finance officials flagged concerns that the latest sale of AIB shares which would leave the state shareholding below 50% would reignite debate over restrictions on pay for senior bankers there.

Civil servants told Finance Minister Michael McGrath that the state having a minority share in the bank would mean little “in practical terms”, but would be seen as a significant milestone.

A submission on the latest stage of Project Viking, the selling down of the state’s stake in AIB, said: “Such an outcome will garner media attention as there is now a strong perceived link with possible further changes in remuneration restrictions.

“This is something the Minister may wish to consider … however, we would not wish such considerations to delay any share sale if conditions are right.”

The state ended up selling a significant chunk of their AIB shares in late June yielding €480.5 million and reducing their shareholding in the bank from 51.9% to 46.9%.

Officials said the €3.64 per share price was the “highest we believed we could push investors without losing significant orders” according to a post-sale briefing for the finance minister.

More than €60,000 in refunds was paid to Irish Rail passengers for trains that ran at least an hour late over the past eighteen months.

The €60,136 in compensation was paid to 2,493 people, at the rate of around €24 per claim made.

Figures from the rail operator show that a total of 294 trains were at least sixty minutes late since the beginning of last year.

There were delays of more than two hours on a further 27 services, according to figures released under FOI by Irish Rail.

The controversial civil servant Robert Watt said the use of public funds to sponsor the RTÉ hit show Operation Transformation was “questionable” and that he had “grave reservations” about continuing to support it.

However, he was told pulling out of the deal at the eleventh hour would be “extremely bad faith” and would force the makers of the show to re-record parts of the programme at late notice.

Mr Watt had been asked to approve expenditure of €282,900 in Department of Health funding for the popular weight loss programme but raised red flags over why it was even happening in the first place.

In an email to a colleague, Robert Watt wrote: “I have great difficulty in supporting this given the sums involved. If we don’t provide funding, what happens? The programme goes ahead with or without some other sponsor.

“What are risks to us of saying ‘no’ now? Please advise me on this. I think using public funds in this manner is questionable and as accounting officer, I have grave reservations.”

In the internal discussion in late 2021, the possibility of giving just €100,000 in sponsorship instead was floated instead of the near €300,000 annual figure that had previously been agreed.

Mr Watt, who himself earns €292,000 annually, then sought a detailed submission on the background to the arrangement and how the Department of Health had ended up sponsoring the programme.

That submission, released under FOI, said there was a “verbal agreement” in place for the department to sponsor the coming series of the show.

It said they had told RTÉ the sponsorship would continue and that this had been “effectively executed” by already working with the producers on the show.

The submission said: “The programme will go ahead if we pull out, possibly with a corporate sponsor.

“This means that instead of being pointed to [our] Healthy Ireland’s trusted information, the circa 500,000 viewers each week will be pointed to the corporate sponsor’s online material, or not pointed anywhere.”

The submission said there were “reputational risks” associated with pulling out of the sponsorship deal after it had been verbally agreed.

“It would represent extremely bad faith, given the show is starting in five weeks,” it said.

“The material recorded for the first episode would be unusable and would require re-recording and bringing the participants (parents and children from various sports clubs etc.) back to Croke Park, where we recorded a piece for the Ireland Lights Up element of the show.”

Overly optimistic cost estimates for major public projects in Ireland were creating “significant public and political condemnation” when the final bill initially put forward had been nowhere near robust enough to begin with.

A risk paper from the National Transport Authority (NTA) also explained how government rules demanding a “fixed price” for every large construction contract had created a “perverse effect” leading to claims culture and adversarial relations between contractors and the public sector.

It said this had incentivised “low-ball tender pricing” where companies would look to win a tender using an unrealistic estimate and then try to claw back money at the end during costly dispute resolution process.

The NTA paper said while fixed price lump sum contracting could work for certain smaller “more conventional” projects, it was completely unsuitable for major programmes.

It said: “Because such programmes face countless variables and pressures, are enormously complex and take years – if not decades to complete, to expect an initial forecast (or fixed price) to stand the test of such wide-ranging variables is simply not realistic.”

The Oireachtas website crashed during the first hearing of the RTÉ spending controversy because of a “connection storm” with Leinster House ruling out any “malevolent” effort to overwhelm their internet page.

Internal records explained how their website normally gets 4,000 requests per hour. However, in the space of five minutes on the day of the very first committee meeting on RTÉ, it received a massive 10,000 such requests.

Emails detailed how there had not been enough computer processing power to scale up for such high demand leading to what was described as a “connection storm” scenario that ultimately caused the website to crash for almost an hour.

A message from one official said: “Christ above. Ok work through and let me know.”

The web manager at the Oireachtas Karin Whooley said the outage had lasted around fifty minutes although the actual livestream of the hearings continued to work as normal behind the broken home page.

An email from Ms Whooley said: “Essentially the website should scale automatically to cope with large volumes of traffic, but it seems it didn’t do so yesterday and users were unable to get to the site.”

Tánaiste Micheál Martin told the Defence Forces chief of staff he wanted all serious complaints of a sexual nature to be immediately referred to the gardaí and no longer dealt with by military police.

In a letter in April, Mr Martin said it was his “strong preference” that all allegations of sexual assault should be investigated externally without delay.

The move had been recommended in the wake of the ‘Women of Honour’ report into widespread mistreatment of female members of the Defence Forces including harassment, abuse, and discrimination.

However, the recommendation that all serious allegations of a sexual nature were dealt with by gardaí required legislation which the Tánaiste and Minister for Defence did not want to wait for.

In his letter, Mr Martin asked that commanding officers be told that any complaints under the Criminal (Rape) Amendment Act should not be investigated by military police.

In correspondence with the Chief of Staff Lieut Gen Seán Clancy, the Tánaiste wrote: “I would ask you to confirm that the interim arrangements have been put in place as soon as possible.”

In a handwritten note, Lieut Gen Clancy said a concise order was to be issued “immediately” to all commanders noting their victim’s handbook, their victim-centred approach, and the need to “comply” with the requirements suggested by Micheál Martin.