OPINION/Garret FitzGeraldMany years ago, when I was either foreign minister or Taoiseach - I forget which - I was entertained to lunch by a journalists' association. There had been recent journalistic comment about the subsidisation of the Dáil restaurant, the economics of which are seriously distorted by virtue of the fact that outside mid-week periods during those parts of the year when the Dáil is in session, its utilisation is naturally very low.
When speaking at the end of the lunch, I enjoyed pointing out to the members of the press that, far from the subsidy they complained about being used to provide food to politicians at low prices, this uneconomic catering facility had to charge such high prices that political journalists who used it during their working day received from their employers an extra allowance for having to eat there!
I think I got away with my teasing the press on that occasion.
But, in general, politicians know better than to criticise or answer back the media, which, of course, always has the last word!
The Freedom of Information Act has provided the press with the means of monitoring in great detail spending on or by politicians, which is a very good thing in terms of democratic openness and transparency.
In the interest of democracy, it is important that any abuse of position by politicians be exposed.
However, not all the stories that emerge from this process are balanced or fair, and even when there are valid grounds for criticism, journalists sometimes go over the top in their comments. This seemed to me to be the case this week when a daily paper other than The Irish Times described the Cabinet as "a coterie of high-fliers, swanky car passengers and big breakfast eaters"!
When I was foreign minister a quarter of a century ago there was no such thing as a government jet. I recall that in the six months of the first Irish EC presidency in 1975 I had to take about 100 commercial flights for journeys totalling almost 65,000 miles.
However, faced with an ever-increasing volume of official travel requirements, a subsequent government rightly decided that there was a need for an executive jet aircraft.
It is important that the use of this be strictly limited to use for official purposes, and then only when there is a genuine time problem that makes commercial flights impracticable, or when a commercial flight would be more expensive than the marginal cost of using the aircraft.
It would be good to know that criteria of this kind are today strictly applied by someone who has the necessary authority to prevent possible unthinking abuse of the system.
I say "unthinking", because a problem that Ministers sometimes face is an excessive concern on the part of civil servants to ensure that their political heads will have no cause to complain about the travel and accommodation arrangements they make for them.
During my first nine-month term of office as Taoiseach in 1981-82 I had come to realise that, because of this particular factor, travel expenditure could end up higher than is strictly necessary - greater, indeed, than a Minister might have incurred if actually making his or her own travel arrangements personally.
Consequently, upon my re-election to office at the end of 1982, I included in a 2,000-word instruction to Ministers a notification that the hiring of expensive limousines should be avoided unless for a stated reason this was essential in a particular instance, and also that rooms, rather than expensive suites, should be booked in hotels, unless it was the intention to hold an official meeting in the Minister's room, as is sometimes necessary.
I also required Ministers who had to travel outside the State, other than to EC Council meetings, to inform my office and the Department of Foreign Affairs as soon as such a visit was mooted, and to keep that Department in touch with any changes of plan. This was designed to avoid Irish ambassadors having to cope with as many as three ministerial visits simultaneously - as had happened in at least one foreign capital.
There are occasions when spouses of Ministers are expected to travel with them, for example when invited to do so on official ministerial visits to another state, or in the case of a Minister accompanying the President on a state visit. Spouses are also expected to travel to the annual OECD meeting in Paris, for example.
I missed the last OECD meeting of my period as foreign minister, however, because Liam Cosgrave resigned the leadership of Fine Gael at a party meeting just after the National Coalition's defeat.
As the meeting ended, Joan was waiting outside Leinster House for us to leave for Paris. As I was a potential candidate for the leadership, I had to go down to tell her that she must go home and unpack!
UN General Assembly meetings were different, in my time at least. Perhaps because of the sheer number of states involved, official dinners on the occasion of General Assembly meetings do not involve spouses.
Of course, there is no reason why a spouse should not accompany a Minister on visits to the UN or on other working visits to states or international institutions as long as the Minister pays for spouse travel. Joan occasionally accompanied me on this basis.
Because of a happy coincidence of dates on one occasion we travelled to and from the UN General Assembly meeting on a Tipperary hurling and Limerick football charter from Shannon to New York - and very good company they were too!
It had been at the suggestion of the wife of the French foreign minister of the day that we had looked for and found this less-expensive way of getting to New York - one that incidentally saved the State money in respect of my fare!
Incidentally, another matter I dealt with in my December 1982 communication to Ministers included control over the number, pay and qualifications of special advisers, whom I required to have relevant expertise, rather than just being public relations officers for their Minister.
I also introduced a limitation on the number of civil servants to be engaged on Ministers' constituency work.
I had discovered that in the term of office of my predecessor no less than 16 civil servants had been employed in a "General Section" of the Taoiseach's Department, undertaking this kind of work.
On my appointment these had been quietly redeployed for public purposes. My own constituency work was handled by the personal secretary I had brought with me from Opposition. I would hope - but cannot be sure - that those attempts to guard against possible abuses survived my departure from office in 1987.
It would be interesting to know how these matters are handled today.