ENDA KENNY will respond to criticism from Fine Gael TD Lucinda Creighton over party funding when he has read the full text of her remarks, the Fine Gael leader said yesterday.
Ms Creighton, who was speaking at the MacGill Summer School in Donegal yesterday, warned of the dangers of accepting political donations from bankers and property developers.
Later, on RTÉ's News at One, she said property developer Michael O'Flynn had been present at a party fundraiser at the K Club golf course.
Mr O’Flynn is company chairman and managing director of O’Flynn Construction, which transferred debts approaching €1 billion to the National Asset Management Agency (Nama). He was recently reported as attending a €1,500 fourball at the Fine Gael K Club fundraiser.
Ms Creighton said she believed the money raised at the event should be returned to the donors.
Mr Kenny, speaking at the publication of an interim report of his party’s Border Forum in Cavan yesterday, said the party’s fundraising activities had been “audited, vetted and were entirely within the law”.
He said he had not read the text of Ms Creighton’s remarks and “I don’t think it is fair to ask me to respond or comment to a speech I haven’t read”. But he said “when I read it I will comment on it”, and said he himself would be addressing the summer school tomorrow.
He said Fine Gael had “taken a very strong view on rogue developments and Nama” and that his view had not changed in any way.
Pressed for a response to reports of the involvement of Mr O’Flynn’s in the fundraiser, which was detailed in the Sunday Independent, Mr Kenny replied: “I have not bought or read the Sunday Independent for three years.”
Ms Creighton made her comments at the summer school’s session on “Standards in Public Life and Accountability”. The party’s Dáil representative in the Dublin South-East constituency said: “These are the politics which have defined and tainted Irish public life like an incurable cancer.
“We cannot be satisfied with low standards in high places. Fine Gael in government must be much, much more than simply ‘Fianna Fáil-lite’.
“We cannot, on the one hand, condemn Fianna Fáil for entertaining developers in the Galway tent, while on the other hand extend the biscuit tin for contributions from high-profile developers who are beholden to Nama. The Irish people expect more from Fine Gael; they demand more, and they are right.
“Fine Gael cannot equivocate about the standards we wish to bring to the running of our great Republic. We need a real ‘New Politics’ – of substance rather than sound-bites. We need a politics that is about serving the people of Ireland, not simply about replacing Fianna Fáil.”
The summer school also heard Prof Peter Mair from the European University Institute in Florence say nobody in Europe was as well-represented by his or her member of parliament than the Irish voter, “but they do it on an individual and at a local level”.
Irish participation in elections was comparatively low, and only one in 50 voters was a member of a political party. “We have a passive citizenry.”