His successor, Catherine Connolly, said during the election campaign she would not take the full \u20ac350,000 salary as Uachtar\u00e1in, but would make donations to good causes, but offered no specifics in either area.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the former President said he returned \u20ac384,467 under a so-called \u201c1938 Allowance\u201d in his second seven-year term, in addition to \u20ac238,443 in his first term, while gifting \u20ac2m to the State in pay and pensions over course of Presidency.<\/p>\n
The \u20ac2m Mr Higgins gifted back to the State comprised of \u20ac1,310,491 in Oireachtas and Ministerial pensions and \u20ac689,474 in pay over the last 14 years.<\/p>\n
Combined with the returns of the 1938 Allowance, these figures represent a return of \u20ac2,622,875 to the State over the course of his two terms.<\/p>\n
The figures are contained in a report available to view or download on the President.ie website.<\/p>\n
It fulfils a commitment made by Mr Higgins during the 2018 Presidential election campaign to provide information to the public on his activities as President each year.<\/p>\n
The 1938 Allowance, which is provided for under the Presidential Establishment Act 1938 and has been available to every President over the last 88 years, is used to meet additional costs not covered elsewhere in the President\u2019s Vote, and assists in enabling each President to define his or her Presidency.<\/p>\n
Over the course of his two terms, former President Higgins used the allowance to support hospitality for the approximately 20,000 people that visited \u00c1ras an Uachtar\u00e1in each year (not including years impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic).<\/p>\n
This included garden parties and State Dinners for visiting Heads of State, along with hundreds of events hosted by the then President and his wife Sabina at \u00c1ras an Uachtar\u00e1in each year.<\/p>\n
The latest figures are in the new document 2025 \u2013 A Year In Review on President.ie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"His successor, Catherine Connolly, said during the election campaign she would not take the full \u20ac350,000 salary as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[40],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,1874,5,34340,7,8],"class_list":["post-459928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-eire","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-michael-d-higgins","tag-news","tag-senan-molony","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}