Political financing - Public is not fooled by disclosures

The murky world of political financing needs to be opened to full public scrutiny.

Eamon de Valera used to decry the dangerous way in which money influenced the political process in the United States, but instead of facing the problem, we seem bent on imitating the Americans and making the same mistakes.

Fianna Fáil plans to raise around €120,000 at a single fundraiser in December, but it will not have to disclose any details of this money to the Standards in Public Office Commission, the body that monitors political financing laws.

The 1,400 to 1,600 people who go to the dinner will be asked to pay €80 a plate for the privilege of mixing with powerful members of the party. The cost is well below the disclosure threshold. Of course, the money raised does not take into account the cost of running the event. As a result, it seems trivial even to raise the issue, but the amount of money involved is not trivial and the whole thing demonstrates how the legislation supposedly designed to clean up party funding can easily be circumvented.

The legislation was obviously just a cosmetic exercise, designed to lull the electorate into a false sense of security. The law only requires a political party to disclose donations in excess of €5,078.95 (or IR£4,000), so by keeping the donations under that amount, contributors can remain anonymous.

We now know from tribunal testimony that there were donations of over £50,000 more than 15 years ago, and it would be naïve for anyone to think that the disclosure law will not be easily circumvented with 10 separate donations of €5,000, some possibly in the names of different members of the same family, instead of one contribution of €50,000.

This applies to all political parties. In its statement to the standards commission last year, for instance, Fine Gael did not disclose the name of a single contributor, because it did not receive any individual contribution of over €5,078.95, even though it raised well over a hundred times that, amassing €576,730 in “fundraising and donations”.

The disparity between the money raised by the parties and the donations that they disclosed is patently obvious in an analysis of election expenditure.

Elaine Byrne of the University of Limerick told the conference of the Political Studies Association of Ireland that the election receipts submitted to the standards commission for the general election of 2002 totalled over €8 million, but the donations disclosed by the parties amounted to little over €700,000, leaving a short fall of around €7.3m. These figures make a mockery of the funding legislation.

Ultimately, the politicians are only fooling themselves and insulting everyone, if the think the electorate as a whole cannot grasp the stark reality of the discrepancy in those figures.