Election spending limits are benefiting parties favoured by the wealthy, writes Mark Brennock.
The limits imposed on spending by individual candidates at election time were designed to counter any perception that an election could be "bought" by a party backed by huge donations from big business.
The limits on the size of donations, together with the requirement to disclose donations of any significance, were all part of a change in electoral practice that came after the financing of politics by business became the cause of great controversy during the 1990s.
However, despite the extraordinary work of the Standards in Public Offices Commission in dealing with 9,000 pages of documents and 200,000 invoices before producing yesterday's report, it tells only part of the story of how much was spent in last year's most expensive ever General Election campaign.
That campaign ran for up to 18 months, yet the legislation only requires that money spent in the final three weeks after the Dáil is dissolved be accounted for.
All parties spent some money before the dissolution of the Dáil, but Fianna Fáil's spending on massive newspaper and outdoor advertising dwarfed that of the rest of the parties combined.
The party draped banners the size of houses on buildings in cities carrying the Taoiseach's face and the "A Lot Done, More to Do" slogan for weeks in advance, in the knowledge that they had no obligation to declare their enormous cost as an election expense.
Perhaps the most valuable tool used by the party in that campaign was market research. Fianna Fáil commissioned focus group surveys and opinion polls to determine the attitudes of voters to help it tailor its message in a manner to garner maximum support. Fine Gael and Labour used such research on a smaller scale.
Yet none of this spending counts as election spending. The Standards in Public Office Commission itself decided that this didn't make sense. At an early stage in the last campaign, it said, "there was evidence that some prospective candidates at the next Dáil general election were already distributing literature which could be regarded as promoting them as candidates at the election". The commission decided that this should be regarded as election expenditure.
However, the Government was having none of it. After receiving advice from the attorney general of the day, Mr Michael McDowell, the minister for the environment, Mr Dempsey, told the commission there would be no change in the law.
This is the same Mr Dempsey who yesterday heckled in support of the Taoiseach in the Dáil when with a straight face Mr Ahern suggested that allowing lavish Fianna Fáil-style spending before the campaign began was most unfair after all.
Noting that the current Minister, Mr Cullen, had said it should be "looked at", he said it was entirely unreasonable that a wealthy TD from his or her own resources could spend a fortune of his or her own money right up to the campaign, whereas another individual who had little or no money had to fight a campaign during the three weeks.
"The system at the moment is designed to make sure that in the years ahead this House will be full of millionaires, and that is a bad system," he said.
This is not quite correct. In May 2002 the system did not ensure that the Dáil was full of millionaires. Rather it ensured that the parties funded by millionaires did very well.
The report shows what the Opposition had said all along: only Fianna Fáil could raise the funds to allow it spend the maximum.
The party spent €33,680 per candidate. While the different spending limits for three-, four- and five-seat constituencies make it difficult to estimate the average spending limit per candidate, the Fianna Fáil figure appears to be above that figure.
No, according to the Taoiseach, any change will be to facilitate the ordinary candidate of modest means currently disadvantaged by the millionaires who can spend before the campaign begins, whoever they are.