Ivor fails to put Cork in the D4 meeja

DÁIL SKETCH:YET ANOTHER example of the Dublin 4 media trying to hound a decent man from the country out of a job.

By the middle of last year, Kilcrohane resident Ivor Callely asked the people who administer the Oireachtas expenses system if he could switch the address of his principal abode from lovely west Cork to darling North Dublin.

After Ivor was appointed a Senator in 2007, it seems he lived full time in the furthest reaches of Co Cork for the next 2½ years.

The bad news for Senator Callely is that none of his former constituents in Dublin North Central noticed the change.

Then again, he may not have resided there all the time. It’s all down to the “anomalies” he told the Seanad. “Anomalies” that are too “complexed” to be explained in a short period of time.

You see, during the old expenses regime, parliamentarians could opt for a country or a Dublin-based scale of expenses. One or the other, even if some of them, like Ivor, were juggling three addresses simultaneously.

In the end, Ivor decided to claim from his Bantry Bay abode.

Yesterday, the legacy of Pee Flynn lived on in the Upper Chamber as Ivor tried to explain how, like St Patrick’s shamrock, he can have three residences in one expenses claim.

The misunderstandings over his feats of bilocation are of course, the media’s fault. He was deeply upset by the “media presentation” of his expenses (as furnished by the Oireachtas in documentary form.) “I have always indicated that I have a west Cork residence, a Clontarf home and a constituency office in Dublin North Central and travel from all three, depending on circumstances, to fulfil my Seanad duties,” he declared.

However, as the Senator told the bean counters in Leinster House last year (but not his colleagues in a packed Seanad yesterday) “my appointment to the Seanad was from my Kilcrohane abode but I do also reside in my Dublin abode.” It’s as if Bertie Ahern had sailed down to west Cork and anointed Ivor on the shores of Bantry Bay, thus sealing Kilcrohane as the place from which he would subsequently claim his expenses.

The new Senator was on holiday there at the time. The new session was yet to start; it’s just as well he didn’t go to Torremolinos, so, that August.

So Ivor settles into life in the Upper House, drawing his expenses like everyone else. For nearly three years, the “complexed” nature of the “anomalies” didn’t get to him. Or if they did, it never stopped him going down to the office in Leinster House, submitting his mileage and subsistence figures and signing-off on them.

He signed for €40,000 worth in 2008. That’s a lot of time living in and commuting from west Cork, particularly when nobody in Dublin noticed the high profile Ivor was missing. He even managed to keep his weekly clinics going. There were also regular sightings of him pounding the seafront promenade and vigorously working out in his local Westwood Fitness Centre.

However, due to a climate change issue (rising heat around the subject of TDs expenses was becoming intolerable by 2009) the former Fianna Fáil minister and sailing enthusiast was keen to put his affairs on an even keel.

He asked that his address be changed to his other residence in Dublin. Anyway, the sticklers in the civil service told him he couldn’t change his address half way through the year.

In November, Ivor was in touch with them again, pointing out he had been indicating “for some time” that his travel and subsistence expenses should reflect his changed circumstances. In December, he said he would not be filing any expenses claims for the final four months of the year.

But why claim nothing? Wasn’t he entitled to claim the reduced expenses of a city-based Senator? He could always tidy up the administrative matter of the change of address in the new year.

Funnily enough, here’s what Independent Senator Ronan Mullen had to say on the subject of expenses on Tuesday: “When I was first elected . . . I was encouraged to claim expenses from my home place in Galway. I was told I would be the better for it financially. I have no doubt those who made the suggestions meant well and thought it was an acceptable thing to do within the system, but it is not.” Just an observation from Ronan. He wasn’t suggesting that Ivor was up to such a scam.

No. It was the complexed anomalies that bamboozled Ivor. The system is to blame, not Ivor the Driver.

Now, the joke is that when senators are asking about a politician they don’t know, the question isn’t “from where do you hail” but “from whence do you claim?”