THE Government has spent €880,000 to lease private jets to fly the Taoiseach and Tanaiste around the globe since last year.
The sky-high charter aircraft bill came as the Government Learjet has been dogged by reliability issues and has not been tasked with a single mission in 2024.
Department of Defence figures show that €617,700 was spent on private jets last year, with a further €269,461 in the first four months of 2024.
The most expensive flight set the State back €158,000, with the jet taking Tanaiste Micheal Martin from Dublin to Cairo, Egypt, and Tel Aviv, Israel, last November for talks over Irish citizens in Gaza.
However, that bill may yet be outdone by another charter flight from April when Martin flew to the Egyptian cities of Cairo and El Arish, and Amman, Jordan, as the department are still “awaiting [an] invoice”.
The Department said that private planes had been leased on 15 occasions since the beginning of 2023, all for trips involving either the Taoiseach or the Tanaiste.
The expenditure began last May when a jet was hired at a cost of €72,000 to take then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to Chisinau, Moldova, on an overnight trip for a meeting of EU leaders.
In October, an aircraft was again chartered to take Mr Varadkar to Brussels, also for a single night, with the bill coming to €48,000.
A sum of €24,700 was spent on a jet to bring the former Taoiseach to Copenhagen in November 2023, before a €46,249 trip to Brussels in December of last year.
The bill for Mr Varadkar’s trip to Pristina, Podgorica, and Skopje in the Balkans in January 2024 came to €108,864 according to info released under freedom of information laws.
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A further €59,108 was spent in late January for an overnight trip to Zurich for the Taoiseach and €45,674 for another journey to Brussels later that month.
Further bills included €70,743 for a trip to Munich in February, €97,383 for a charter to Brussels in March, and €87,576 for a jet to fly to Brussels and Warsaw in April of this year.
The use of charter jets has become a regular cost as the Government Learjet that would normally be used is no longer considered reliable.
On at least three occasions, senior politicians have ended up ‘stranded’ at airports abroad after the plane developed technical issues during ministerial air transport missions.
The situation came to a head last December when Simon Harris, then Higher Education Minister, arrived at Baldonnel Airport in Dublin and boarded the Learjet, only to be told the €8million plane had suffered yet another fault causing him to miss an important meeting in Belgium.
The Department had no further comment to make on the costs.
