THE annual cost of keeping two embassies open in the Italian capital is more than €2.6m a year, the Department of Foreign Affairs has revealed.

The department had faced calls from former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald to shut one of its embassies in Rome and amalgamate the facilities into a single office.

However, the department said it would be impossible to close its Vatican embassy as the pope's offices would not recognise the Italian ambassador.

A statement said: "There is no possibility of combining either the premises or ambassadorial duties of these two missions.

"Apart from having very different purposes, the Vatican will not accept the accreditation of an ambassador who is also the ambassador to the Italian state and neither will they accept the accreditation of an embassy with the same address as the embassy to the Italian state."

Figures released by the department show that operating costs for the two embassies came to a combined €2.63m in 2008 with a slight reduction expected for this year due to spending cuts.

The embassy to Italy costs €1.87m a year to operate with 13 staff – including eight locally employed people – working there on a daily basis.

The embassy to the Holy See cost €763,379 in 2008 – it employs three local people as well as two Irish diplomatic staff.

The embassy to the Vatican is already owned by the state and the main building and ambassadorial residence are combined in a single valuable building. Annual upkeep expenses at that building are estimated at around €140,000.

Two properties used by the Irish embassy to the Italian state are rented at a cost of more than €500,000 per annum, the department said.

"The residence is rented on favourable terms as the Irish state has rented the property for over 50 years. The chancery is rented on a long-term lease having moved into its current premises in 1996," a statement said.

The costs primarily include salaries, travel, post, telecommunications, office machinery, office expenses, incidental expenses and the cost of hiring domestic staff to wait on embassy staff.

The department said the embassy in Rome was also accredited to Libya, San Marino and Malta. The ambassador to Italy is also Ireland's permanent representative to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The Department of Foreign Affairs is under increasing pressure to cut costs after it emerged that diplomats at six-high profile missions had shared expenses of more than €7.7m over the course of just two years. In cities such as Rome, the department routinely rents properties costing up to €5,000 per month to house diplomatic staff and their families.

It also emerged that in the past two years, the taxpayer had spent more than €230,000 in school fees for nine senior diplomats in different embassies around the world since the beginning of 2008.

The Department of Foreign Affairs said it is looking at proposals to shut at least one Irish embassy to cut the diplomatic bill, with the mission in Tehran considered most likely to face the chop.