Among the gifts was $15,000 to Mr. McDonnell's daughter to help her defray catering costs for her 2011 wedding.
Puckoon was filmed in Ireland on a budget that wouldn't cover the catering costs on a typical Attenborough movie.
"We joke that it wouldn't even cover the catering costs for one Hollywood movie," she said.
Gary Peters, managing director of Evolve Events, said that companies can save between 10 and 15 per cent on venue hire and catering costs.
We are paying for the wedding ourselves and went all out on the catering costs because food is important to us.
The officials acknowledged that although they welcomed the event, they later balked at paying the roughly $20,000 in catering costs because they deemed it excessively lavish, unauthorized and mostly to the benefit of the two businessmen.
Bands who bankroll their own tours will reduce hotel and catering costs by crashing on the sofas of strangers, she adds: "In the US, lots of bands have used couch surfing sites to go on tour".
"We were driving around that morning, saying, 'Isn't it amazing how nothing can go wrong?' " While an extravaganza like that is never going to be cheap, a ceremony for two invariably saves money over a ceremony for 200 (consider the catering costs alone).
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom, the big New York law firm, clamped down on meal allowances, car services and catering costs during the recession of the early 1990's, "so we don't have a lot of easy pickings laying around now," said Earle Yaffa, the firm's managing director.
If only Major League Baseball could blame its financial woes on illegally inflating losses from the sale of corked bats, disguising billions of dollars in profits as clubhouse catering costs or burying revenues in off-balance-sheet limited partnerships called "Mo Vaughn's Diet" and "Goes Well to His Right".
