Monday, September 6, 2010 Previous editions
Monday, May 11, 2009
MONEY, as in who gets what and what they do with it, seems to be an increasingly common theme in the media and on politicians’ lips.
People are often at their most inventive when it comes to claiming money and the taxman has been at his most diligent in trying to stamp out such practices.
But when it comes to politicians and their expenses, keeping tabs has been more difficult – especially when we rely on them to change the rules to allow us to see exactly what they get and for what.
After decades of controversy the European Parliament voted to reform the expenses regime and the new, hopefully improved, version will come into force when the new parliament begins in July.
In the meantime, politicians will veer between wanting to prove that they are open and honest, and fearing they will horrify the less well-off in society if they discover what kind of money they earn.
Unfortunately, we have not decided that those who represent us should be paid extremely well, but be held very much to account on how they represent us.
But apart from all this interesting information about politicians’ expenses, there is another area that people should be equally, if not more, concerned about.
What section of the public is getting taxpayers’ money in the form of grants, subsidies and incentives?
On a human level its understandable that politicians might want to hide details of the money they get, but not so when they also want to hide details of who and what others get from the public purse. Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in this area has come about in the EU, where there tends to be greater transparency than in national governments.
This breakthrough is in the area of the money that goes to agriculture. For years national governments have fought against publishing details about the EU’s biggest single budget line.
Gradually, under new legislation and intense pressure from the European Commission, departments of agriculture have published some figures. They have been told, publish all or face court action. Countries had until the end of April to publish who got farm subsidies for last year – but so far only eight countries have done so properly.
Ireland is one of 10 countries in breach of the regulation, and has been accused of "engaging in apparent deliberate obfuscation of their website", making it difficult for the taxpaying public to see who got what.
We scored a miserable 28% in an analysis carried out by a pressure group looking for increased transparency in agriculture funding. Their results are at www.farmsubsidy.org
Ireland published what the top recipients got, they are mostly companies, but when it comes to individual farmers, there are few names. Of course anybody really interested could narrow it down thanks to the breakdown not just by country, but also by town land. But this is a lot of work for somebody that wants to see who got their, public, money.
The top five companies to make the most money out of the EU’s common agricultural programme are Italian. They are joined by Ireland’s Greencore, that got €83.4m to take the company out of sugar production, putting an end to Ireland’s sugar industry and drawing to a close decades of failing to make the industry profitable and sustainable.
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