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Leinster House spent almost €340,000 on travel for TDs and senators last year, with politicians going on all-expenses-paid trips to Vancouver, China and Vietnam.
The costliest trip was a visit by three politicians to China as part of the Ireland-China parliamentary friendship group last September.
Flights for Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen, party colleague James O’Connor and Sinn Féin’s Aengus Ó Snodaigh came to a combined €17,000, according to a database of travel costs released by the Oireachtas.
There was also an accommodation bill of €3,171 and smaller sums paid out in subsistence plus €40 in “miscellaneous costs” for the trip.
The next highest bill was the €19,863 paid out for five TDs and senators to travel to Vancouver in western Canada for the annual session of the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) last summer.
Flights cost around €2,100 for each participant, while just over €2,000 was paid for hotel accommodation for three of the Irish delegation.
Other costs on the trip included €700 refunded in telephone costs as well as subsistence payments of €6,741, which appears from the records to have included the cost of one of the transatlantic flights.
The taxpayer footed a bill of €18,286 for a trip by three members of the Seanad to Angola last October to attend an assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. That figure is made up of €13,339 in flight costs, but one member of the intended delegation did not travel, and Leinster House is seeking a refund of some, or all, of the €3,278 paid for that plane ticket.
Accommodation costs for the trip came to €4,777 — or €1,592 per person — while there were “miscellaneous costs” of €170.
Other trips that set the taxpayer back a five-figure sum included a visit by four Irish politicians to Armenia for a meeting of the OSCE last November, which cost just over €14,000.
More than 40 trips were organised by the Oireachtas in the second half of last year, with an average cost of around €3,500, although many involved short hops to cities such as Brussels and Paris.
Between July and September, Leinster House paid out a total of €152,000 for travel by members of the Oireachtas, with insurance claims pending for around €6,700 in costs where the TD or senator involved was not able to travel.
Of the €152,000 total, €78,000 went on air fares, €49,000 on accommodation and €19,000 for subsistence claims.
There was also expenditure of €2,145 on train tickets, €1,075 in refunds for phone bills, €811 for taxi fares and €843 in “conference costs”.
A single bus ticket costing €9.59 was reclaimed by one value-conscious politician, according to the data.
Altogether, the Oireachtas spent €338,079 on travel for TDs and senators last year, but a detailed trip-by-trip breakdown was only provided for the second half of 2023 under Freedom of Information legislation.