THE head office of the Labour Party is to vet all fund-raising letters by Ministers and Ministers of State, under a new code of conduct drawn up by the party.
Ministers will be required to have all letters requesting financial support signed jointly by the party's financial secretary for the first time. The letters must also be written on Labour Party notepaper. The position of financial Secretary is a voluntary one and is held by Ms Jo Walsh, who lives in Limerick.
The new set of procedures covering financial and fund-raising events was presented to the party's executive committee in the wake of the controversies surrounding the Minister of State, Ms Eithne Fitzgerald, and the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Mr Higgins, recently. They are due to be ratified next Wednesday.
Under the party's first written code of financial conduct, all elected members of the Labour Party, including Ministers, must receive approval for all fund-raising events. The executive committee must be informed of the type and objective of the event, the date and place, the participation of elected representatives, including Ministers, and the proposed budget.
The code also obliges constituencies, divisional councils and branches to draw support for fund-raising events "as far as practicable" inside their own functional area.
The three-page document, seen by The Irish Times, has been produced at the request of the executive committee "to formally describe and present a set of procedures to cover financial and fund-raising events in the Labour Party". It is Labour philosophy, it says, to hold all events in venues where trade union labour is employed and where equality practices are in place.
It is quite clear from the document that it is targeted at preventing a repeat of the embarrassing fund-raising controversies which have engulfed the party.
The Minister for Finance, Mrs Quinn, and Ms Fitzgerald were forced to apologise to the Dail some weeks ago for issuing invitations to a £100-a-plate fund-raising lunch on semi-official notepaper. The invitations, promising "a rare opportunity" to question Mr Quinn "in a semi-formal environment" in advance of the publication of the Finance Bill, were sent out by Ms Fitzgerald. The lunch was eventually cancelled.
In the second incident, the opposition parties sought the resignation of the chairman of the Independent Radio and Television Commission, Mr Niall Stokes, and Mr Higgins in what they considered to be a conflict-of-interest situation.
Mr Stokes, who was appointed by Mr Higgins, became a member of a new committee established "to support the Galway Labour Party and its TD, Mr Higgins". He appended his name to a booking form for the first such fund-raising event.
