More than €900k spent on new cars to transport ministers, the Taoiseach, and the President
More than €910,000 has been spent by An Garda Síochána over the past year to buy 11 new cars for the fleet that transports ministers, the Taoiseach, the President and other officeholders.
The average cost of the vehicles – all of them made by Audi – was around €83,000 with the majority of them plug-in hybrid models.
Four of the new arrivals were diesel Audi A6 50 TDI Quattro vehicles despite the high environmental emissions they cause.
Most of the rest were plug-in hybrids of the same model bringing the total number of eco-friendly vehicles in the 41-car fleet to 22.
Nineteen of the cars in the ministerial pool are still diesel cars, a mix of BMWs and Audis and one custom Ford Transit.
Some of the cars have amassed colossal mileage with four of them having exceeded 300,000km on their odometers. One of them – a BMW 740 bought in 2017 – has run up 358,172km, enough to circumnavigate the globe around nine times.
The lowest mileage in the fleet was just 22,705 kilometres for an all-electric Hyundai Ioniq that was bought in 2023.
As well as the €913,840 spent in the past 12 months on new vehicles, two old cars had been removed from the fleet.
The fleet has grown substantially in size since the 2022 decision to restore garda drivers to all ministers due to security concerns.
However, An Garda Síochána said they would not provide a car-by-car breakdown of costs.
They said if the pricing information was made available, it could put their supplier at a competitive disadvantage. They also declined to provide details of which cars were allocated to which officeholder.
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