Public anger brought change after scandals in the 1990s, but interest in good governance has not survived the boom, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
IF COLLECTIVE political outrage were a sexual act, the Irish would be urgently in need of Viagra. We just can’t keep it up.
The great guitarist Leo Kottke once described the unfortunate singing voice that kept him from becoming a superstar as sounding like “geese farts on a muggy day”. That’s pretty much the sound you could hear last week if you listened very hard to the stirrings in the political undergrowth. It was the despairing, expiring gasp of the last paroxysm of rage to grip our polity, way back in the mid-1990s.
Readers of a certain age will remember it well. A series of scandals shattered the facade of patriotism and decency – the purchase and resale to Telecom Éireann of the Johnson Mooney and O’Brien site in Dublin; the complex Greencore scandal; the multiple allegations of fraud and tax evasion by the Goodman group and so on. Public anger expressed itself in a surge of support for Dick Spring and the Labour Party. For a time, no politician could utter a sentence that did not contain the words “openness”, “transparency” and “accountability”, which were in such general use that they were boiled down to an acronym, OTA.
OTA gave us three pieces of legislation – the Ethics in Public Office Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the Electoral Act. Their purposes were, respectively, to set standards of behaviour for politicians; to ensure that government would be done, as Albert Reynolds put it, “behind a pane of glass”; and to break the influence of big-money donors over political parties.
But we couldn’t keep it up. Like grunge, leggings and scrunchies, OTA was a 1990s fad. Once the economy started to lift off and the political system seemed to be delivering the goods, there was a collective loss of interest in the idea of good government. One by one, the three pillars of OTA were allowed to crumble.
The ethics legislation turned out to be as toothless as a gummy frog. There were occasional feather-dustings for small fry. (Denis Foley’s Ansbacher account, for example, resulted in a two-week suspension from the Dáil – in effect a paid holiday.) When it really mattered, with the revelation that Bertie Ahern was on the take and could not produce a tax clearance certificate, the legislation was a beaten docket. The Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo) made a terse announcement in September 2007, in relation to Bertie’s dig-outs, that “there is no basis on which to initiate an investigation”.
That put the Ethics Act out of its misery.
The Freedom of Information Act, on the other hand, was deliberately sabotaged. Charlie McCreevy gutted it in 2003. What was significant was the complete lack of public response. Journalists and campaigning groups complained, but no one, almost literally, wanted to know. The citizenry as a whole simply gave up without a fight a right it had acquired in response to the corruption scandals of the 1990s.
Which left the Electoral Act and the new transparency about party funding. Last week, it crawled off into the bushes and spluttered out its last lonely breath. The cause of death was ridicule. The main political parties have laughed it out of existence.
What happened is this: precisely nothing. Zero, nada, zilch. That is the grand total of donations reported last year to Sipo by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour. It was, remember, an election year, with the European and local elections, two Dáil byelections and the Lisbon referendum. Political parties were spending money, so they must have been raising it. Yet none of the three big parties (or Libertas, which ran an apparently well-funded campaign on Lisbon) declared a single cent in donations. Indeed, the only donations declared by anyone were those made by Green, Sinn Féin and Socialist representatives to their own parties.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out what’s going on. The limit below which donations do not have to be declared is €5,078.95. I’ll take a wild guess and say that there are an awful lot of individuals and companies who find that they can just about afford €5,078.94 to support our precious democratic system.
This isn’t just cynical, it borders on the fraudulent. When this disclosure regime was introduced, there was a big sweetener for the parties. In return for letting us know who was feeding them with cash, the parties received massively enhanced payments from the public purse. Between them, the parties got almost €5.5 million from the taxpayer last year.
That’s our side of the deal. The other side is, as Sipo put it last week, that “It should be possible for each citizen to have a clear picture of election spending by each candidate and party and also a clear indication of the sources for such funding.” By brazenly evading this obligation, while continuing to take public money, the main parties are showing open contempt for even the most minimal effort at political reform. Their calculation, of course, is that public outrage is just more geese farts on the wind.