The political system is awash with private donations that undermine the principle of 'one man, one vote', writes Vincent Browne.
THE ETHICS Acts that were intended to clean up Irish politics have failed to clean up Irish politics and the Government has refused to make even the minimal changes to the Acts that the Standards in Public Office Commission has suggested. After all the years of disclosure of corruption and shenanigans in Irish public life, there is clearly no political will to do much about it.
In a report published yesterday, the Standards in Public Office Commission has again drawn attention to the inadequacies of the present legislation. It recalled that last December it noted that €11.08 million was spent by political parties in the 2007 general election campaign - or rather that bit of the campaign for which they were required to disclose expenditure - but these same political parties reported donations of only €531,000.
In an introduction to the 2007 annual report published yesterday, the chairman of the commission, Mathew Smith, who is also a judge of the High Court, commented: "The standards commission has repeatedly pointed out that this means that it is not known how the parties financed their election campaigns in 2007 and there is no obligation on political parties to disclose the source of this funding.
"It is clear to the standards commission that parties are soliciting donations below the disclosure threshold. Monitoring of expenditure on election campaigns is also limited to expenditure on resources or material used during the election period, which runs from the date of dissolution of Dáil Éireann to polling day, and so a great deal of expenditure by parties and candidates before the commencement of the election period goes unaccounted for."
In other words the disclosure requirements obscure what is going on and who is financing which parties. We don't know how much money parties spent on the campaigns as a whole (the requirements in the last election applied only from the date on which the election was called, April 29th, 2007, and the date on which the election was held, May 24th, 2007) and we know the source of funding only in a fraction of the cases.
It is quite clear that several of the political parties and candidates spent tens of thousands of euro in the months leading up to the general election, which everyone knew was going be in May of last year. For instance in Dún Laoghaire, two of the Fine Gael candidates, Eugene O'Regan and John Bailey, spent huge amounts of money on 48 sheet posters at Dart stations and elsewhere. O'Regan had spent €45,000 in securing a seat on Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council in 2004 and, obviously and reasonably, he thought he could succeed again through similar means. Surprisingly this did not quite work in 2007 - but it nearly did.
Money confers very substantial advantages on candidates, as established in an academic paper written by two political scientists at Trinity College, A Fistful of Euros: Campaign Spending Effects Under the Single-Transferable Vote Electoral Systemby Kenneth Benoit and Michael Marsh.
At the very least the relevant legislation should be changed to require disclosure of the totality of spending during an election campaign, perhaps going back a year. And then there should be disclosure of the identity of all sources of donations. But more than that, the standards commission should also be empowered to institute investigations, at its own initiative, into expenditures by parties and candidates and investigations into the sources of financing.
Brian Cowen has already signalled his opposition to the proposal to give such powers to the standards commission but the Opposition parties could exert a little pressure on this were they to commit themselves to such changes.
But the most important reform would be to ban all private finance from the political system and fund campaigns from the public purse and that alone. Any intrusion of private finance into the political system subverts the equality that supposedly underpins the system captured in the slogan "one man, one vote" (with apologies for the sexism).
Parties that represent the interests of people who can afford to make donations and afford to fund donations from their spouses and adult children (thereby circumventing the cap on donations) have an unfair advantage over parties that represent the interests of people who are poorer and who cannot make donations, or at least not to the same extent.
This is pernicious.
There is no "right" to buy the political system, to buy political influence and power, and anybody who believes that this is not one of the chief motivating impulses in making donations is naive.
Of course the corporate media (among which I include RTÉ) also distort the political balance by invariably reflecting the interests of the powerful and established in society and that, too, is a corrosion of democracy. It is an argument for dismantling corporate dominance of the media, an argument which, clearly, carries little weight in the political arena or in the media regulatory arena at present. But that is another battle.
In the meantime, at least the parties that purport to be of the "left" such as the Labour Party, the Greens and Sinn Féin, should now insist on radical changes to the legislation governing the funding of political campaigns and, ideally, should demand an end to all private funding, including, incidentally, funding by candidates themselves.