A FORMER civil servant who defrauded the Department of Social and Family Affairs of €147,000 by claiming overtime he was not entitled to, has been given a three-year suspended sentence.
Donal McBride (57) had been working as a higher executive officer for 10 years and had been with the department for 37 years when the fraud came to light.
He retired with a pension and has been paying 25 per cent of that back to the department to make full restitution. McBride, Easton Road, Leixlip, Co Kildare, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to four charges of deception at Con Colbert House, Con Colbert Road, Dublin, between August 26th, 2001, and April 6th, 2007.
Fergal Foley, prosecuting, told Judge Yvonne Murphy that the charges represented a sample of 59 counts from August 2001 to October 2008.
Det Garda Peter Clifford told Mr Foley that the department had conducted an internal audit and discovered McBride was the highest recipient of overtime.
Further checks were carried out and it was discovered McBride had forged overtime claim forms.
He had added his name to a list of employees entitled to overtime after a senior official had signed a form to approve payment to the other staff.
Det Garda Clifford said McBride had “co-operated as much as he possibly could have”.
He said he had since received two lump sums from the department which he paid back to them.
He now owed over €23,000 and was making monthly payments by deductions from his pension.
McBride would have made full restitution by the end of 2014.
Judge Murphy said in most similar cases the “money is not paid back” but acknowledged that McBride’s crime represented “a serious breach of trust”.
“I see no useful purpose in imposing a prison sentence. He is making very good progress and this would be severely disrupted if he went to prison,” the judge said, before suspending the entire sentence on the condition that McBride keep the peace and be of good behaviour for three years.
Det Garda Clifford agreed with Raymond Farrell, defending, that McBride had told gardaí in interview he had been suffering from depression and was an alcoholic. He accepted that he had always been held in high esteem, and had been described by one of his superiors “as a person of impeccable character”.
Another said he had always found McBride to be “wholly reliable”.
Mr Farrell said that his client was a separated man with three children.
He said he began to drink quite heavily in 1996, and began to suffer from depression in 1999. McBride attended for residential treatment for his mental illness in April 2009.
Mr Farrell told the court that his client accepted what he had done was extremely wrong as he was a person in authority who had abused a position of trust.
He said that he had lost his self-respect, he had to retire from his position eight years before he was supposed to, and was paying a monetary penalty for what he had done.