True moral giants

This column has a new champion, a moral giant trapped within a man's body. Incredulously, he is a politician.

I say incredulously, for espousing even the minutest smidgeon of admiration for any politician is normally up there with shaving my eyeballs on my list of favourite activities.

The fine fellow in question is the president of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza. Conscious of international accusations against leaders of impoverished African countries of wasting money on expensive fripperies - qv the king of Swaziland's habit of buying BMWs for his teenage brides - Nkurunziza has put the brakes on the purchase of a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers by his government.

In a poverty-stricken country where most people live on 25 cent a day, spending €60,000 on a car seems a tad gauche, to say the least. In fairness, President Pete can't take all the credit - he was only following the example of neighbouring Rwanda, which is planning to auction off 1,000 state-owned vehicles to raise much-needed cash.

How the great and the good in Leinster House could learn from their African colleagues. You may not be aware, but it costs you and I around €3 million per year to provide each of the glorious Cabinet members with State cars.

Now, I'm no begrudger, I wouldn't mind at all if they used them solely for the benefit of the people who are paying for them. It's the flagrant squandering of State assets on themselves that gets my goat.

Take Mary Harney - a woman who flew to Sligo from Dublin at taxpayers' expense two years ago to open a friend's off-licence. Bad enough. But the gig wasn't even in Sligo. 'Twas in Manorhamilton in lovely Leitrim. Did she get a taxi? Did she James Gogarty. Her State driver - who had made the trip from Dublin especially to pick her up at arrivals and whisk her off to aforementioned shindig - drove her.

Presumably she spent the journey home flagellating her buttocks with thorn bushes in self-admonishment and fretting about the moral implications of this frivolous spending in a country where the old and sick of the land are begging the underfunded and underpaid nurses in our hospitals for a bit of respite.

It would be pertinent here to mention John O'Donoghue's use of his State car to drive his family at high speed home from de match, but it's so reprehensible that I can't bring myself to even mention it.

Instead, the antics of Jim McDaid, who stopped off in England while on his way to Toronto for St Patrick's Day in 2003, back in the good old days when he was still a minister.

Bored of sitting around airports anonymously, he was ferried from Birmingham to Cheltenham in a hired Merc for a day's racing and backslapping and whatever else he'd be doing at a racecourse. At day's end, off to Heathrow with him. The cost to you and I? €2,000.

And then there's Mary O'Rourke. Ireland's answer to John 'Two Jags' Prescott. She has a handy little job as leader of the Seanad. While she doesn't enjoy the privilege of having a sleek example of luxurious modern engineering steered by some strapping lad from Offaly at her beck and call, she has does have a car allowance and the right to hire civilian drivers.

And by golly did she exercise her right. She has not one, but two drivers. To be fair, she is only availing of that to which she is entitled, and even waived her rights last year. Much as I'm tempted, I can't accuse her of abusing her position.

But with an election coming soon and plans to take back her seat in the big, sprawling constituency of Longford-Westmeath she may be needing those drivers after all.