LAST week new proposals for funding General Election candidates and political parties were announced, and this week saw the publication and the accelerated passage through Dail Eireann of an Oireachtas (Miscellaneous Provisions) and Ministerial and Parliamentary Offices (Amendment) Bill which provides for a new and more generous system of party leaders' allowances.
So we now have the full picture of the arrangements which are designed to deal with the problem of political parties' over-dependence upon contributions from business interests.
The constitutional requirement for equity and fairness of treatment of parties and candidates has made it necessary to adopt a very complex three-pronged structure for State financing of politics. The tables below are designed to illustrate how, in practice, this complex, system would have worked had it been in operation at the time of the last General Election in 1992, as well as setting out the annual payments it is proposed to make to the parties as at present represented in the Dail.
The first column of Table 1 shows how much each party would have received in 1992 to refund expenses incurred during that year's election campaign, if this system had been in operation at that time. The following three columns show the annual amounts that each party would have received in the immediate aftermath of that election, if this new system had then been in operation.
And the final three columns of this table show the annual rates of payment proposed for each party arising from the change of government two years ago and the by-elections that have occurred during this Dail. The Other Funding figures are, however, subject to modification in the light of next year's General Election results.
Because parties in Government have their leaders' allowances cut by one-third, in recognition of the facilities available to them when in office the Fianna Fail figure is now higher than would have been the case three years ago, and the Fine Gael figure is correspondingly lower than what that party would have received when in Opposition earlier in the life of this Dail.
In evaluating these figures it is important to recognise that in their present form these proposals preclude the application to electoral purposes of either of the parties' two sets of annual payments. This means that the only State funding now to be made available for election expenses is a limited refund of £5,000 in respect of each candidate who, on the final count of his or her votes, secured at least one-quarter of the quota.
As will be seen from Table 2, if these payments had been available at the time of the 1992 election, they would have amounted to £1,460,000.
That sum would have been barely one-fifth of the amount party candidates would have been permitted to spend under the limits now proposed for election expenditure. This would have left up to four times the amount of State funding still to be found by party fund-raising, which, even allowing for party fund-raising by draws, race nights and so on, would in practice have had to come largely from the business community, either locally within constituencies or nationally.
How realistic are the proposed spending limits, which it should be noted are designed to cover both local constituency spending and national party spending, mainly on advertising? From my recollection of Fine Gael's election expenditure at national and local level in the early 1980s, and from what I then heard of other parties' spending levels (but allowing, of course, for the more than doubling of prices since 1981) I would judge that the ceilings on expenditure now proposed may in real terms be somewhat lower than the amounts that have been spent by parties in past General Elections.
Now there is no harm in that, for a good deal of what has been spent at elections in the past has probably been unnecessary, having been competitively induced; that is to say, brought about by each party's fear that another party might outbid it with more and bigger advertisements or with a more massive display of posters.
The truth is that the removal of control on election spending in the 1960s, the motivation for which I never understood, was a costly mistake, for it encouraged electoral extravagance. The proposed reintroduction of spending limits is a very positive move.
But if I am right in my view that these new limits are quite tight by reference to the practice in elections during the past couple of decades, then, whatever may be the case with self-financing Independent candidates, political parties are likely to feel a need to raise funds on a scale that will approach these constraining limits.
And I find it disturbing that the gap it is proposed to leave between the amount parties will remain entitled to spend and are likely to seek to spend and the amount of State finance to be provided for this purpose is to be of the order of £5 million.
In the light of recent events there seems to be a very strong case for not merely reducing but actually eliminating the dependence of political parties on support from sources such as business during elections as well as between elections.
But the above analysis suggests that although these proposals are likely to eliminate the need for business contributions to fund political parties' running costs, they would leave parties still heavily dependent on business contributions at election times.
It is hard to resist the impression that these proposals have not been adequately thought through and that the problems posed by business funding of politics have yet to be satisfactorily resolved.
For unless these proposals for State funding of election expenses are modified to allow some of their annual payments from the Exchequer to be saved up and applied for electoral purposes, and/or changed to increase substantially the proposed Exchequer funding of election expenditure, this whole exercise of seeking to insulate political parties from business pressures could prove almost entirely abortive.
Politicians would then have incurred all the odium of having increased funding for their parties without succeeding in getting out from under their present controversial, and politically unpopular, dependence on election funding by business. And that doesn't seem very sensible.