Watchdog: Audits unreasonable for political parties with little cash

The State’s ethics watchdog has said it is “unreasonable” for small political parties to fully audit their accounts, after the first report on what organisations received and spent for 2015.

The bigger parties, including Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, have outlined their different streams of income as well as how those monies, including donations and state grants, were spent.

The report released by the Standards in Public Office (Sipo) Commission is the first of its kind after new legislation and looked at the statement of accounts for parties, both large and small.