THE call by the Progressive Democrats for a tribunal to investigate payments made by Dunnes Stores to politicians or public servants was described as "premature" by the Government Chief Whip, Mr Jim Higgins.

"Members of the PDs, having regard to their concern for restrictions in public expenditure, will acknowledge that the establishment of a tribunal on this particular matter would be very expensive."

Media reports had suggested there might be some 1,500 names listed in the Price Waterhouse report relating to payments made by the company, he said.

Do the PDs seriously suggest that a tribunal of inquiry would be in a position to quickly, or even within 90 days, secure the publication of the names of members of the Oireachtas and other public officials, as well as clarify the motives and circumstances of any payments made to them by Dunnes Stores and the truthfulness or otherwise of media reports?"

Mr Higgins, who was replying to the PD private member's motion calling for a tribunal, said the Government had acknowledged there was widespread public concern arising from media reports on the alleged contents of the Price Waterhouse report and had acted to alleviate it.

He said Judge Gerard Buchanan was now examining the report and would extract from it details of all payments made, or transactions entered into. He would then report to the Dail Committee on Procedure and Privileges and to the Seanad Committee on Procedure and Privileges.

What the Government had been concerned to achieve was the early publication of the names of any politicians, public servants or political parties that might be contained in the report, said Mr Higgins.

"The Government has also been concerned to ensure that this is achieved in the most cost-effective basis. We feel these twin objectives can be achieved by the agreement now made with Dunnes Holding Company."

Only a properly constituted tribunal of inquiry had the legal authority to get satisfactory answers to the Ben Dunne payments affair, Mr Robert Molloy (PD, Galway West) said.

"There is simply no way that complex transactions of this kind can be properly investigated through the strange set of arrangements which have been put in place by the Government," he said.

Why, he asked, should one person be "outed" for receiving £1,000 while somebody else got away with a million pounds because it was paid offshore. "Let's have a proper investigation and let's give it the resources to do the job properly. If certain people were prepared to take pains to cover their wrongdoing then surely the State should be prepared to take pains to uncover it."

It was claimed that a tribunal would cost too much. "Yet, those people on the Government benches who don't want to spend public money on a tribunal are the same people who want millions of pounds of taxpayers' money spent on funding political parties."

In the wake of the beef tribunal it became fashionable to ridicule the whole idea of judicial inquiries. The beef tribunal went on too long and cost too much, but those mistakes would not be made again.

A judicial inquiry was one of the most valuable tools a democracy had available when it came to discovering the truth. The Bantry Bay and Stardust tribunals had done valuable work and the inquiry into the hepatitis C scandal had made excellent progress.

"In the hepatitis C scandal, the State poisoned thousands of innocent people. In the Ben Dunne/ Price Waterhouse/Deputy Lowry affair, there is a fear that private money threatens to poison our whole democracy."

At the heart of the controversy lay a document listing payments by Dunnes Stores to various individuals, some private and some public. "That document should be published in full and investigated in depth. The people are entitled to no less. Only a public inquiry can achieve both these objectives."

He added the public would not be satisfied with the "pass-the-parcel" arrangement cobbled together by the Government.

"The secretary to the Government hands the document to a retired judge. He selects certain names from it and hands them to the Ceann Comhairle. He hands it to the Committee on Procedure and Privileges. They hand it to a sub-committee.

"That committee will have no power to investigate. It will have no power to compel witnesses. It will have no power to request documents. It will have no power to censure.

"The whole thing will be a damp squib. Money will be spent. Time will be wasted. And at the end of the day the people will be none the wiser as to what has gone on. So much for openness, transparency and accountability.

"Does anybody really believe that this ludicrous exercise in paper shuffling is an adequate response to the crisis of public confidence which now threatens the whole Irish political system?"

Judge Buchanan was a fine and upright individual. The Committee on Procedure and Privileges was an excellent body, with a distinguished chairman, the Ceann Comhairle. "Nobody is questioning their integrity or their abilities. But without proper investigatory powers their efforts will be useless.

"Confidence in the political system is at a low ebb, and that confidence will not be restored if, in the middle of one of the biggest scandals in years, politicians are not willing to tell the truth come out, said Mr Molloy.

The Fianna Fail leader renewed his attack on the Government's handling of the Lowry affair during the debate.

"I regard it as a grave public scandal that this House has still been given no satisfactory explanation of this matter, and that the Fine Gael Party has not demanded one.

Mr Bertie Ahern said the public simply did not understand how anyone, least of all a minister should be unable to explain credibly within a very short space of time how they financed improvements to their house.

"An incomplete, complex, convoluted explanation, constructed long after the event, will have less and less credibility as time goes by. It is clear that there was no declaration of interest furnished to the Taoiseach on his appointment.

"The longer a satisfactory explanation is outstanding, the more the question arises as to whether Deputy Michael Lowry, former chairman of Fine Gael, is a fit person to be a member of this House.

It was a legitimate question to ask, he said, whether anyone else in public life benefitted in a similar manner from Mr Ben Dunne's largesse, especially as others were named in the Price Waterhouse report. But it was very wrong to engage in rumour and innuendo, in an attempt to deflect attention from a highly embarrassing situation.

Mr Ahern said it would be difficult to see how a tribunal could be avoided without co-operation from everybody involved, beginning with Mr Lowry.

He said the people who could be called before it included present and former public representatives and officials. "Inquiries cannot be limited to named individuals and amounts in the relevant categories in the Price Waterhouse report. Efforts would have to be made to determine whether any cash or under-the-counter payments had been made either to them or to others, in the list or outside of it."

But Mr Ahern said he could understand the hesitation about establishing a public tribunal.

Mr Ahern said that the issues relating to party funding should be looked at dispassionately and objectively. At an instinctive level, he had some sympathy with the position of Mr Kevin Boland, who, writing in the early 1980s, regretted Fianna Fail's change from being the "small man's party", totally dependent on the small subscriptions from each parish in the national collection, to being, as he put it, "financially patronised by the bosses".

At the same time, society and the political system had become more complex, more elaborate, more ambitious, said Mr Ahern.

He agreed with the point of view that political parties were voluntary organisations that should not, broadly speaking, be funded by the taxpayer.

"But there is a choice to be made. If we want to reduce the level of dependence on private contributions, and we do not want our political parties to be heavily in debt, then the element of State funding has to be reviewed."

Mr Michael McDowell (PD, Dublin South East) said the most Judge Buchanan could do would be to put before a committee of the House a list of probable infractions of the law. "If we are dealing with impropriety here we should adopt measures which are adept to the detection of impropriety as it is practised. Let us not take a feather duster into battle."

The Government's proposal amounted to "a weak-minded delaying tactic". The people wanted to hear the truth. "If this House is serious about getting at the truth let us first put our hands on the means of establishing the truth."

The PDs accepted a Fianna Fail amendment deleting a proposal to inquire into the truth or otherwise of newspaper reports and proposing instead to charge the tribunal with investigating whether serving or former members of the Oireachtas or public officials had received payments.

The Democratic Left leader and Minister for Social Welfare, Mr De Rossa, said what the Government was proposing had a far better chance of achieving the desired result than any alternative approach suggested. A tribunal as suggested by the PDs would be a recipe for prolonged hearings, with huge legal bills, the real prospect of journalists ending up in jail and, for all that, no guarantee of any satisfactory or complete answers.

Some commentators had expressed concern that the procedure proposed by the Government could take a few weeks to get the relevant names from the Price Waterhouse report into the public domain. But a tribunal was likely to take much longer.

The Government's procedure was just one element of its response. The other was to press head with the Electoral Bill, which would ensure that everything relating to the funding of political parties would be out in the open and it would impose limits on election expenditure by parties and candidates.

The Minister for the Environment, Mr Howlin, said media speculation surrounding the discovery of the Price Waterhouse report "has cast a shadow of suspicion over everybody involved in politics and public administration". That situation was completely unacceptable and untenable.

The Government must first address the immediate suspicion surrounding the report. He believed the House would want the list of names of people in public life apparently contained in the report published as soon as possible. That should be done in a manner consistent with natural justice and fair play.

Secondly, the Government must ensure open disclosure of all - significant financial contributions to political parties. It must provide for open disclosure of election expenses, the capping of election expenditure and provide for a system of State funding for the political system in line with the practice in most European countries.

The advice to the Government in the light of the McKenna judgment by the Supreme Court was that all candidates and political parties must receive equal treatment when it came to State funding of political parties. He had been working over recent months to revise the Electoral Bill and would be bringing specific proposals to Government today. He had already received the Government's approval to proceed quickly with the committee stage of the legislation.

Regarding the procedure agreed by the Government for dealing with the Price Waterhouse report, Mr Howlin said the Government's only objective was "to get to the bottom of this matter and that is what we are determined to do.

Debate on the motion continues this evening.