Political funding - Tribunals must finish their work

POLITICAL fundraising has always been a murky business, carried out by the very smoothest party apparatchiks on the fringes where business and politics collude.

It can throw a blanket of suspicion over any politician — no matter how squeaky clean — forced to admit they have benefited from substantial patronage.

The “no-strings-attached” blather is never as convincing as anyone who can spell “planning” would wish.

These entirely natural suspicions are deepened when one tries to understand the motivation behind this generosity in the cause of political activism.

Those suspicions deepen, as with the British Labour party and donor David Abrahams, when the benefactor goes to great lengths to remain anonymous.

Indeed, the British electorate are so suspicious that the Conservatives have opened an 11-point lead over Labour, the biggest lead they’ve enjoyed since the days of Margaret Thatcher 20 years ago.

That turnaround has a parallel on this side of the Irish Sea in the improved figures recorded by Fine Gael.

At least the British public will have an opportunity to have the Abrahams’ suspicions tested as the police arealready investigating the affair and have interviewed Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

It is entirely possible that Mr Brown’s reputation will go the way of his predecessor Tony Blair’s, now so tarnished by the honours-for-sale scandals.

The Taoiseach will have taken a degree of comfort from his Pyrrhic victory this week, when his Tánaiste Mary Harney survived a vote of no confidence, but he, too, is fighting to save his reputation. Despite the Health Minister’s travails he will have had at least one ear cocked to the Mahon Tribunal in anticipation of his return visits to Dublin Castle on December 20 and 21.

He might have heard the sound of tumbling bulwarks as Padraic O’Connor, chairman of the Irish Stock Exchange, told the tribunal that a political donation of £5,000 was made to Fianna Fáil after an “unwelcome” request to stockbrokers NCB.

Mr Ahern earlier suggested that the £5,000 was a loan to him, from an old friend, during his hour of need. File under “dig out” and forget about it unless it is uncovered, in other words.

Mr O’Connor has rejected the Taoiseach’s assertion that they enjoyed a relationship that might involve personal loans of that kind. The balance of credibility swings strongly towards Mr O’Connor when you consider that a cheque for €11,829, sent to him by Mr Ahern “in full and final settlement of the outstanding loan you very kindly extended to me all those years ago” has been entrusted to Mr O’Connor’s solicitors.

The tribunals have gone on for too long and have cost too much. There is a clamour to wind them up and forget about their work, an attempt to ignore — or at least put aside — their unsettling implications.

They are like a sushi chef taking the tiniest slivers, one after the other, from a fish to create a single entity, a defining presentation of a lot of ordinary things given context and greater meaning by being brought together.

“No one will go to jail, and the only winners are the legal teams who are making a fortune,” is the clamour coming from those who would have them closed and silenced. Those people who would have us believe all is well in our public affairs and that it matters not if they are not. Nonsense; absolute and utter nonsense.

A nonsense shown for what it is by the deeply worrying Prime Time revelations earlier this week about rezoning of lands by various local authorities.

Without the tribunals — faults and all — how else would we find out anything? We’d have no reason to believe that all our political leaders and that all of our leading businessmen are not above reproach.

And our old friend, the Sugar Plum Fairy, will get the Irish soccer manager’s job.