Haughey leaps to O'Kennedy's aid to bump up his pension

O'KENNEDY PENSION:HE MAY have been minister for finance for the 1980 "tighten your belts" budget but in 1981 Michael O'Kennedy went to great lengths to increase his ministerial pension entitlements.

When, in March 1981, the newly appointed European commissioner O’Kennedy found himself one day short of five years’ ministerial service for another rung on the pension scale, the Department of Finance gave him an extra day because “1980 was a leap year”.

This leap year day, on February 29th, 1980, which gained O’Kennedy an extra £500 a year, was just two days after he delivered the austerity budget.

An official at O’Kennedy’s office made an appeal by phone to taoiseach Charles Haughey’s office in March 1981, files released from 1981 taoiseach’s office show.

The official suggested that O’Kennedy’s first appointment to cabinet (as minister without portfolio by Jack Lynch) should be counted from the date it was approved by the Dáil (December 14th, 1972) rather than when the president, Éamon de Valera, made the official appointment on December 18th, 1972.

O’Kennedy’s formal appointment by the president in 1972 was deferred for a few days because he was at an OECD meeting in Paris on the day the Dáil approved it, according to a letter from Haughey to O’Kennedy’s successor in the Department of Finance, Gene Fitzgerald.

Haughey wrote to Fitzgerald within a day of receiving the message from O’Kennedy’s official, perhaps showing his loyalty to O’Kennedy, the only minister who had publicly supported his 1979 leadership bid.

“On the face of it, it does seem rather harsh that Mr O’Kennedy’s absence from Dublin on the date in which the Dáil motion was passed should result in his standing to lose some thousands of pounds over a period of years, Haughey wrote.

He wrote that it was “difficult to see” a remedy unless there was a solution acceptable to the comptroller and auditor general and the public accounts committee.

He asked Fitzgerald to have the problem considered at his department in consultation with the attorney general’s office.

The Department of Finance came up with the leap year solution.

“It is possible to bring Commissioner O’Kennedy’s service up to the requisite level by allowing him credit in respect of the extra day resulting from the fact that 1980 was a leap year,” Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to Haughey on March 13th.

“He will, therefore, be entitled to pension at the 33 per cent rate,” he added.

Writing to O’Kennedy at his Brussels office on March 19th, Haughey wrote: “It is now possible to bring your services up to the requisite level by allowing you credit in respect of an extra day.

“I expect that you are now well settled in your new role and hope that Breda and yourself and the family are happy in your new environment,” he added.

In his reply of April 1st, O’Kennedy wrote that he was happy to receive the “good news” and that he would have his family “fully settled” in Brussels “in the not too distant future”. However, a year later he quit Brussels to return to domestic politics.