Catherine Murphy concerned over ethics of corporate culture

Independent TD Catherine Murphy of the new Social Democrats party has said many business people have approached her with concerns about the ethics of Ireland’s corporate culture.

Speaking on The Irish Times 'Inside Politics' podcast, she said a culture of looking after citizens' interests had to be fostered.

“I’ve had lots of people from the business community talk to me, they maybe don’t want to put their heads above the parapet, but they are concerned about the ethics around the corporate culture here,” she said.

“We have secrecy, and that’s why the Official Secrets Act we think is incompatible with the whistleblowers’ legislation.”

Ms Murphy said the people who made decisions had to be held accountable for those decisions.

“It was politics that was at the heart of the failures, the under-regulation of the likes of the banking system, the light-touch regulation, that was very deliberate.”

Ms Murphy said in all the years she had been involved in politics, she had never seen people pay attention to current affairs in the way they are doing now. She said she believed the financial crash had prompted the change.

“The political space has shifted where people are far more open to looking at the kind of things that I have talked about for years.”

Asked by presenter Hugh Linehan about the scale of the Social Democrats' aspirations, Ms Murphy said she hoped the new party would run a candidate in every Dublin constituency.

She would like the party to contest in every constituency in the country but admitted that would be a challenge. “We’re only up and running a week,” she added.

Ms Murphy said the party was influenced by the approach taken by the Nordic countries, but would not exclude good ideas from other parts of the world.

She said the way politics was funded was “very exclusive” and the distribution of power was “just plain wrong”.

The Dáil had been made redundant and a small number of Cabinet Ministers took all the key decisions. In many cases, laws had been influenced by the construction industry.

She said the Labour Party's forays into government had been disappointing. Ms Murphy is a former Labour Party member. "For me it wasn't a good experience...it was quite combative."

However, Ms Murphy said she had learned from the experience and it was “water under the bridge”.