FAS, the Irish state jobs-training agency, and its director general Rody Molloy are at the center of a political storm over lavish spending of taxpayers' money, including €643,000 on trans-Atlantic travel over the past four years.

Molloy defended the spending, which included the cost of business class flights from Ireland to the U.S. for himself, his wife and senior FAS executives. He also splashed out FAS money on luxury golf outings and authorized expenditure of several thousand euro on U.S. trips for one of former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern's former top advisors, Paddy Duffy. The all-party Dail (Parliament) Committee on Public Accounts has been inquiring into FAS for a number of months, including its failure to secure value for money for its €9 million advertising budget. Molloy makes a personal appearance before the committee this week. Committee chairman Bernard Allen has confirmed that it received documentation about the travel and subsistence spending and will be examining it along with the other issues. There have been widespread calls on Molloy to quit his €203,000 a year post - which last year was boosted with an extra €35,458 performance-related bonus - but he has insisted he did nothing wrong. Taoiseach Brian Cowen has expressed full confidence in him. Molloy, who heads a workforce of 2,200 and a €1 billion a year budget, gave a live radio interview to RTE broadcaster Pat Kenny in a bid to justify the spending, but he succeeded only in adding further fuel to taxpayers' anger. He said much of the expenditure involved promoting the FAS Science Challenge program which links up Irish students and apprentices with top science institutes in the U.S., including the NASA space centre in Florida. A $942 game of golf at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress Resort in Orlando in January 2005 was part of a process of developing relationships with NASA contacts. He also defended the expenditure of $410 at a beauty and nail salon in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in August 2005. He told Kenny, "Getting into detail of the preparation of somebody for a particular event, again the amount of money in terms of the total package is very, very small." In 11 flights to the U.S. he was accompanied on five occasions by his wife Noreen. He said he was entitled to first-class travel for himself but traded that for two business-class tickets when flying with his wife. Paddy Duffy, a close associate of Ahern, traveled to the U.S. as a guest of FAS in 2004 and 2006, although he had no official role with the authority. Duffy's trips - one of which cost €4,562 - were charged to the Science Challenge project. The scandal was unveiled in a special investigation by independent Senator Shane Ross in his business column in the Sunday Independent. Ross and his colleague Nick Webb also revealed that the credit limit on one FAS executive's company credit card was €76,000, that almost €7,000 was splashed out on a night out in a private dining room at Dublin's five-star Merrion Hotel, and that one executive and his wife went on a three-week round the world trip on business class tickets that cost the taxpayer €12,021. FAS spent €13,000 in less than a week on chauffeur services linked to U.S. astronaut Aileen Collins' visit to Dublin in 2006 to promote science for children in Ireland. FAS executives used their company credit cards for pay-per-view movies in their hotel rooms. One card was used to pay for a €116 suitcase from Macy's which was then used to carry €646 worth of presents bought at the airport. Ross, who obtained much of his details under the Freedom of Information Act, commented that it appeared taxpayers' money was being spent with "gay abandon" on FAS's science graduate program. "FAS is a jobs-creation agency....There is something incongruous about a body so concerned with unemployment spending money like water." Main opposition spokes-man on enterprise, Leo Varadkar of Fine Gael, called for Molloy's resignation, saying his position was now untenable. Varadkar said, "If FAS is to survive at all, we need somebody to clean it up and it's fairly clear, given his attitude to taxpayers' money, that he's not the person to do it." Molloy, who is from Birr, Co. Offaly, received the public backing of Cowen for the second time this year. Cowen said he always had confidence in Molloy and knew him personally as "an excellent public servant down the years." Last June, Cowen also defended Molloy in the Dail, saying that he was "a person whom I personally hold in the highest regard and whose integrity I would defend at all times."