'A depressing political week, when we saw serious corruption at a local level in our politics'

What surprised me about the programme was not that corruption existed, but that it was so easy to find, writes Alison O’Connor

At the end of their term of Government it can be said of Fine Gael that there doesn’t appear to be much they have left to learn from Fianna Fáil.

If we were to end up with the two parties coalescing after the General Election it’s unlikely there would be too much effort needed to acclimatise to each other culturally.

This has been a depressing political week, when we saw serious corruption at a local level in our politics, and at national level a failure to introduce effective legislation to curb this greed and gombeenism.

The failure brings to mind that infamous speech given by the then party member Lucinda Creighton at the MacGill summer school in 2010 when she said Fine Gael should not be satisfied with low standards in high places, and in Government needed to be much more than “Fianna Fáil lite”.

Well, when it comes to ethics and planning laws Fine Gael have shown they could actually teach the FF’ers a trick or two. We have an ethics watchdog, the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) which has effectively been operating with two hands tied behind its back, and pleading for a decade for tighter legislation. Surely any Government serious about political reform and apparently “cleaning up” after Fianna Fáil’s long tenure in office, would have seen this as an immediate priority.

Couple that with the new legislation for a planning regulator that, rather than being independent, will have the role of giving “advice” to the Minister of the Environment. Remember, the Government pledged to establish this regulator following on from the Mahon Tribunal Report, which had its establishment as the central recommendation.

Remember also that report found “endemic and systemic” corruption in our political system and spoke of the “possible systemic problems in the planning system” But like a child refusing to hand over its favourite toy, the Government has made a nonsense of the reform of our planning.

At any rate, it is most unlikely this planning regulator, with its watered-down powers, will be established before the general election. We have so few examples of bodies which are able to stand up to the Government, the Fiscal Advisory Council being one, and even that gets mostly ignored. It’s clear they didn’t want to encourage any more of this type of upstart behaviour.

This is part of a pattern. This is the same Government, including Labour, which made sure to call a halt to seven independent inquiries into local authorities ordered by previous Environment Minister John Gormley in 2010. These were replaced with internal reviews.

A local authority whistleblower, Gerard Convie, a senior planner with Donegal County Council, was forced to go all the way to the High Court with his allegations of impropriety after one of these internal Department reviews found no evidence of the wrongdoing he had alleged. The High Court agreed with Mr Convie, and as a result, the Department apologised to him and paid over €25,000.

Cue an about-turn from the Government who reinstated the original independent inquiries into those local authorities. Regular followers of Irish politics will be unsurprised to learn that this report has been sitting on the Minister’s desk since last July.

Post the boom, we can point to far too many examples of bad planning and how they have negatively impacted on us and our environment.

There will be various reasons put forward for the widespread flooding that has hit the country this week, but without doubt some of the victims will be those whose houses were built on flood-prone areas where planning permission should never have been granted.

The RTÉ Investigates programme on Monday night examining how seriously or otherwise our public representatives take our ethics legislation was an example of public service broadcasting at its best. It is this type of programme which makes me quite happy to pay my licence fee. Reporter Conor Ryan deserves high praise.

But the truth is that this is just the sort of work that should be carried out by a SIPO-type body. However, for that to happen SIPO would need a proper legislative basis, not the mishmash it currently operates under, and sufficient funding.

The Government has actively ensured that this has not happened. How incredible is it that we have an ethics watchdog which cannot instigate investigations of its own volition? It brings a whole new meaning to impotence.

What really surprised me about the RTÉ programme was not necessarily that they found corruption, but how easy it was to find. How incredible it was that, on a first meeting with this woman, Hugh McElvaney was so open in his demands. There was no need for subtlety on her part, no beating around the bush.

As part of its research, RTÉ extablished that over 40% of our almost 950 councillors declared no property interests whatsoever when filling in forms despite a legal obligation to list all interest in land, including their family home.

This speaks volumes about the general attitude to ethics. After all, as they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

More than 40 councillors across Ireland accepted there were omissions in their statutory declaration during the RTÉ investigation which examined property, corporate and occupational interests and focused on areas where there were discrepancies between official declarations and the public records.

In some cases, politicians did not disclose companies that were in receivership, others that were listed as tax defaulters, and even development sites that ended up in Nama.

RTÉ Investigates cast their net and, as already mentioned, this was no complicated sting operation. If you do the numbers it is obvious that while the majority of our elected representatives are honest, there are more out there who can be bought for a quick buck.

The majority of our councillors are members of political parties. It’s clear that many of them would take the party’s annual national draw more seriously than their ethics obligations, and they don’t feel pressure from headquarters to change this behaviour.

Nor do, for instance, the Fine Gael and Labour councillors see their senior party members prioritising strong legislation or sending out the message that once and for all they will weed out this corruption.

It also speaks volumes that the three men involved, while two have resigned from their parties — Fianna Fail and Fine Gael — they remain as councillors and did not feel compelled to stand down.

It is not enough for Fine Gael to look down their nose at Fianna Fáil. It is true that it is impossible to imagine a scenario where Taoiseach Enda Kenny might put forward the yarn, for instance, that a large amount of money had been won “on the horses”.

But then Fine Gael sold themselves to us as morally superior animals; that they were simply not as bad as Fianna Fáil, who, they told us, ruined the country through their corruption.

The least that could have been expected after all their rhetoric was that a new standard would be set. But it all reeks of a business as usual approach.