Sir, - Your seething Editorial (June 13th), which concerned the Government's electoral reforms was misleading, overtly political and unbefitting a newspaper of record.
Minister Dempsey's reforms of electoral law are about ensuring a transparent and inclusive democratic process. The Electoral Bill, which you find so objectionable, contains measures to aid the democratic process through electronic voting, longer opening times for polling stations and assistance for those with a sensory impairment or with a difficulty in reading and writing in exercising their democratic right to vote.
Apart from ignoring these important and overdue reforms, your Editorial fails to engage with the substance of the measures relating to political transparency. This Bill will ensure that all candidates, representatives and political parties maintain special political donations accounts through which all donations must be channelled. It will ensure that certification is provided to confirm that all donations lodged into that account were used legitimately. It will ensure that the statements from the accounts are sent to the Public Offices Commission. No single opposition proposal would ensure this degree of transparency.
Having ignored the substance of reform, your Editorial instead used the Electoral Bill as a tenuous news-angle for an immoderate anti-Government outburst. The main argument advanced in the Editorial, which relates to the existence of corporate donations is spurious. To focus solely upon corporate donations is to accept that there is a difference in terms of political morality between corporate and individual donations. Is it somehow more transparent, more acceptable for the director of a company to donate £5,000 to a political party personally than for his company to donate £5,000 as a corporate entity? Plainly, it is not.
This Electoral Bill provides the workable, progressive reforms which will ensure proper accountability and transparency. It is an essential part of the Government's ongoing ethics programme which, by any measure, is the most progressive and active in Europe.
In your continued assessment of this Ethics Programme, I would urge a return to objectivity, to the determination to look at both sides of the argument, to the just and reliable record for which your newspaper is justifiably renowned. - Yours, etc.,
Noel O'Flynn TD, Mallow Road, Co Cork.