McGuinness: "Never deliberately set out to benefit from public purse"

He defended his requests for his wife to travel on a trade mission with him and a subsequent business class trip they took together and overtime paid to his son when he worked as an assistant in the Dail.

Mr McGuinness also defended the €250,000 office development that was ordered by the Office of Public Works (OPW).

But he accepted he would have handled things differently in hindsight.

“Did I personally go out to do something wrong? Did I do things that were to deliberately benefit me or deliberately access the public purse? It wasn’t,” he said.

Mr McGuinness has been under pressure to step down from his role at the powerful accounts watchdog amid repeated reports on how money was spent while he was a junior minister.

He also says that allowing his wife to travel with him for a St Patrick’s Day engagement overseas was a benefit no different than any other minister was granted.

The Fianna Fail TD enjoyed a €22,000 ministerial trip with his wife Margaret in March 2008 to Seattle, when he was a serving junior enterprise minister.

He has also faced criticism for overtime that was paid to his son, when he was in office between June 2007 and April 2009.

The overtime reportedly amounted to €30,000.

Mr McGuinness said he was not the only minister who travelled abroad on official duties with his wife at the time and that things were different “back then”.

“Looking back at it now, it was a different country then in 2007,” Mr McGuinness told the committee.

“What was acceptable back then is not acceptable now and I accept that.”

Mr McGuinness had been accepted by the Fine Gael-Labour coalition to head the Public Accounts Committee in 2011 after being put forward by Fianna Fail. Independent TD Shane Ross also ran for the job.

The former junior minister was also one of the favourites to head an inquiry into the banking collapse in Ireland.

Mr McGuinness said he would never set out to damage the committee because he has ``far too much respect'' for it.

“If I’ve given the impression that you seem to have that I offended a member or that in a way I have damaged the committee, that was not intentional,” he said.

“I would not set out to do that and I do not believe myself to be bigger or better than anyone who sits here on this committee.

“I happen to be chairman of the committee but I would happily serve as a member of the committee which I have done before.”

Mr McGuinness said there seemed to be a suggestion that he was the only minister to travel with a spouse in 2008.

But he insisted that “lots of people” did so, and they reimbursed their respective departments or committees for the costs.

He said a group of committee members, under the chairmanship of current Finance Minister Michael Noonan, travelled to Sacramento with their wives in 2008.

“I was on that group, our wives were taken with us and we paid for our wives,” he added.

“That’s a fact and I’m sure that there are other examples that we can turn to. What seems to be unusual about travel is that it seems as if I did it and nobody else did in 2008. That’s not the case.”

Mr McGuinness confirmed he took three trips with his wife, paid for by the State.

These included two St Patrick’s Day trips to Seattle and Edinburgh, and a promotional event to London, of which he could not recall exact details.

He rejected suggestions that he “intimidated” civil servants in correspondences requesting that his wife accompany him on trade missions to Dubai and Canada.

Mr McGuinness insisted that he had offered to pay for his wife’s share of the costs, but was stonewalled due to protocol.

The chairman said he is not “a traveller by nature” and that he, upon taking his position, simply wanted to clarify procedure for “exceptional circumstances”.

He said he was trying to challenge old ways, but that was six years ago, and that he would behave differently today.