‘I was selling Dublin’: Dublin mayor Ray McAdam defends €5,900 business-class travel to California
Dublin’s Lord Mayor, Ray McAdam, said he was “selling Dublin” during a trip to California in March that cost the taxpayer €24,000 for five people.
Mr McAdam’s flights cost almost €5,900 while Dublin City Council chief executive Richard Shakespeare’s travel cost €4,185.
The total bill, amounting to €24,000, included travel and accommodation for five council staff and councillors. One member of the group did not travel and a refund of €1,775 was subsequently issued.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, the Lord Mayor said he travelled to San Jose, which is twinned with Dublin, “in the same way that other Lord Mayors did” in the past.
"The partnership between Dublin and San Jose has been 40 years in the making, and partly as a result of that partnership, we have seen companies that are based in Silicon Valley in San Jose making their European headquarters here in Dublin,” he said.
Mr McAdam added that tech companies like Meta and Dropbox employed more than 15,000 people in Dublin, and he was looking to secure further US investment with the trip.
"If I wasn’t doing the role of selling Dublin, looking for investment, I wouldn’t be doing the job of Lord Mayor,” he said.
The Fine Gael councillor said that he doesn’t book flights and the local authority does that on his behalf.
“The key thing here is that there’s a huge opportunity now for massive investment in Dublin. That’s what I sought to achieve, and in the years ahead, I hope we’ll be able to deliver on that,” he said.
Mr McAdam and the council came under fire for the figures in recent days, with Sinn Féin’s Janice Boylan calling the bills “eye watering”.
Ms Boylan said council officials flying business class and staying in “luxury hotels” while the authority increases rents on social tenants was “an absolute insult to the people of Dublin”.
"It is simply unacceptable that public officials would think it is appropriate to splurge public funds in this way, particularly at a time when people are being pinned to their collar by the cost-of-living crisis.”
Mr McAdam and Ms Boylan are both candidates in the upcoming Dublin Central Dáil bye-election.
On a separate trip, the council spent almost €600 per night on accommodation at a luxury hotel with a private beach in the south of France in March. The council recorded a bill of nearly €11,400 at the four-star Royal Antibes hotel for an official trip by officials and councillors in March.
In total, more than a dozen trips were taken by staff and elected members of the council during the month of March.