Presidential election candidate Catherine Connolly has said she never gave the impression that she used her own personal funds to pay for a trip to warn-torn Syria in 2018.
This is despite saying at her campaign launch last July: “I funded that trip.”
The Irish Times reported on Thursday that Ms Connolly used a taxpayer-funded allowance for spending of almost €3,700 related to Syria.
The spending was included in her statement of expenditure for the Parliamentary Activities Allowance (PAA) for 2018 which was filed with the Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo).
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After failing to respond to questions on the matter on Wednesday, Ms Connolly confirmed, after the publication of The Irish Times story on Thursday, that she used the taxpayer funded PAA for the trip.
She went to Syria, at a time when brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad was still in power and engaged in a civil war, as part of an Irish delegation that also included then fellow Independent TDs Clare Daly, Mick Wallace and Maureen O’Sullivan.
At her presidential campaign launch in July she said it was a “fact-finding” trip, that she “met no member of government” and did not ever “utter one word of support for Assad”.
When she was asked at her presidential launch who funded the visit to Syria, Ms Connolly replied: “I funded that trip.”
At a press conference while campaigning in Rathfarnham, Dublin on Thursday, Ms Connolly was asked why she said in July that she funded the trip herself.
Ms Connolly said: “That’s exactly what I did, out of my parliamentary PAA allowance. That’s exactly what I did.”
Put to her that the impression given was that she had used personal funds, she replied: “I never gave that impression, that’s an allowance that’s given to every single independent TD. There are a number of different categories, and I tend to use it under policy and research, and that’s exactly what I did.”
Ms Connolly said her use of the PAA “has always been on the record, and everything complied with, it’s audited by an independent auditor and it goes back to Sipo.”
Asked if her comment in July, that she had funded the trip, was misleading, she said: “I was asked a question and I answered the question”.
Ms Connolly’s campaign did not respond to a request for a full breakdown of what the €3,691 sum related to Syria in her 2018 PAA expenditure statement was spent on, when initially approached by The Irish Times on Wednesday.
The campaign team did not respond to attempts to contact them by phone, text and email that day.
Also on Wednesday, Ms Connolly told reporters she had “no difficulty as a candidate with scrutiny and accountability”, adding that “questions should be posed and answered”.
However, on Thursday morning her campaign released a statement confirming she used a portion of the PAA under the “Research” heading “to support a fact-finding visit to Syria”.
The total declared amount was €3,691, as set out in her Sipo return, the campaign said.
“This expenditure was made for research purposes: to gather first-hand information relevant to Catherine’s parliamentary work on foreign policy, humanitarian issues, sanctions, Irish neutrality and Ireland’s role in international institutions. Costs covered standard travel and subsistence. No personal benefit accrued.”
The statement continued: “Engagement with people and organisations on the ground in conflict settings is part of responsible parliamentary research. Such engagement does not imply endorsement of any government, faction or policy.”
Ms Connolly has previously said the delegation visited a refugee camp outside Damascus and “saw first-hand the destruction of a whole city”. They travelled to Aleppo and met the chamber of industry, had a meeting with Unicef workers and visited a convent.
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While in Aleppo, the Irish delegation met Syrian businessman and politician Fares al-Shehabi.
Although he was an independent MP, Mr al-Shehabi was a supporter of the military actions taken by the government side in the civil war. He was deemed a supporter of the Assad regime and placed under European Union sanctions.
In one incident Mr al-Shehabi posted on social media about a seven-year-old girl (who had been posting online about the war and criticising the regime), writing: “Dear world, it’s better this little witch die before she starts, with her sponsors, WW3!”
During an RTÉ Radio interview at the end of August, Ms Connolly was asked about the Irish delegation meeting with Mr al-Shehabi.
“I had absolutely no respect for that man after listening to him for the duration that I listened to him,” she said. “He was the head of the chamber of commerce. There was community activists with us and that man was put under serious pressure in relation to questions. Were we happy with the answers? Absolutely not.”
Asked whether, in hindsight, she thought it was a mistake to meet Mr al-Shehabi, Ms Connolly replied: “Certainly in retrospect, when one looks back and sees the comments that he made and you see them, absolutely, this man is utterly unacceptable to me.”
During the interview, Ms Connolly said she has “never, ever hesitated in my utter condemnation of Assad publicly and privately”.
She said the trip to Syria “empowered me, enabled me and made me stronger as a voice for peace and to use our voice at every level in every situation to abhor what’s going on”.
