Candidates will find TD seat challenge difficult, says Howlin

IT WILL be very difficult for any defeated candidate to challenge the seat of a sitting TD following the latest Supreme Court ruling, former Environment Minister Brendan Howlin claimed yesterday.

The Supreme Court ruled before the weekend that any candidate could challenge the seat of a sitting TD in the High Court if that politician had exceeded their election spending limit.

Three candidates who were narrowly defeated in the election said they may challenge the result in their constituencies if any TD is found to have overspent. These include: Wicklow Labour councillor Nicky Kelly; Cork South Central Independent candidate Kathy Sinnott and Kildare North Fianna Fail candidate Paul Kelly.

But Labour deputy Brendan Howlin, who drafted the original legislation on which the Supreme Court ruling was based, said it was unlikely that any such challenge would succeed.

Any challenger would have to prove that a contravention of the Electoral Act 1997 was knowing in other words that a sitting politician knowingly cheated, Deputy Howlin said.

This would be very difficult to prove because the rules governing election spending only changed on the eve of this year's general election.

"I think the principle has to be that as long as people endeavoured to the best of their ability to comply with the rules as they were laid down by the independent commission, the courts will accept this," Deputy Howlin said.

Any challenger would also have to prove that the overspend by the successful candidate effected the outcome of the election, Deputy Howlin said.

Sitting politicians had budgeted their general election campaign spend on the limits which said they did not have to include the free Oireachtas secretarial services, telephone and postage valued at around 5,000.

But the High Court ruled on May 16 that election spending guidelines were biased in favour of sitting politicians and they would have to include the value of their free Oireachtas services in their spending returns.

The Government challenged this decision and wanted the Supreme Court to rule that the High Court decision would not apply to this year's election because elected politicians did not have sufficient notice about including their free Oireachtas services in their returns.

Deputy Howlin said the pre-election splurge by the Government parties needed to be stopped the next time round because it gave them a huge advantage.