in Brussels
The former secretary general of the Department of Finance has backed claims by Taoiseach Enda Kenny that the possibility of deploying the Army was considered at the height of the financial crisis. , at the launch of the annual report of the European Court of Auditors in Brussels, Kevin Cardiff told The Irish Times that all options were discussed at various points between 2010-2012 when the country was in the midst of the financial crisis.
“Throughout the crisis there were very serious events that could have had very profound consequences for the Irish economy, and throughout the crisis the various authorities were considering what that might mean and what their reactions had to be,” he said. “It would surprise me very much if the authorities concerned with security and policing didn’t consider what they would do if there was unrest around bank machines, cash deliveries and the like.”
He said secretaries general of all departments, including the Department of Justice, held weekly meetings at that time. The former secretary general, who led the Department of Finance from the end of 2006 to January 2010, appeared before the banking inquiry in June. He is to publish a book, based in part on his 350-page report to the inquiry, next February, after it publishes its final report.
Mr Cardiff said any royalties from the book, which is being published by Liffey Press, would go to charity. “I hope the account, which will be based on my work on the banking inquiry, will be something that members of the public will find interesting,” he said.
Mr Cardiff was appointed as Ireland's representative on the European Court of Auditors in late 2011. Based in Luxembourg, the body audits the accounts of the European Union, ensuring the EU budget is implemented correctly and funds are correctly accounted for.
In its annual report for 2014 published yesterday, the Court of Auditors passed the EU budget for last year but found an overall “error rate” of 4.4 per cent, which suggests 4.4 per cent of EU funds were misspent, slightly below the 4.5 per cent posted the previous year.
Most errors took place in the sphere of agriculture, the biggest sources of expenditure in the EU’s budget. In particular, the audit found overdeclaration of agricultural land surface or the use of ineligible parcels of land to secure EU agriculture funding were the most frequent errors.
The European Court of Auditors bases its audit on a random sampling of transactions across member states and spending areas. In 2014, it sampled about 1,200 transactions across the EU and found 22 instances of suspected fraud, which have been forwarded to the EU’s antifraud agency, Olaf.
Ireland, which in recent years has moved from being a net beneficiary to a net contributor to the EU budget, received about €1.4 billion from the budget in 2014, with agriculture and structural funding accounting for 86 per cent and 12 per cent of the total respectively.
The remaining funds received included funding for education-related programmes, the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund and a €12 million payment for the Veterinary Fund. Ireland’s contribution to the EU budget totalled €1.635 billion last year.
Mr Cardiff said this year’s audit did not throw up any particular issues in Ireland. “The transactions we test for audit purposes are selected on a randomised basis across all member states. That means in the case of a small country like Ireland, a relatively small number of transactions will be sampled. While the transactions we sampled did have errors, these were very small relative to the amounts concerned.”
About 80 per cent of the errors committed in the implementation of the EU budget were done at member state level. However, the report also noted a number of member states were struggling to spend the EU funds given to them, a concern likely to be seized upon by EU critics ahead of the British referendum on EU membership.
