Standards in public office body is more lapdog than watchdog

Many may view the controversy swirling around former junior minister Robert Troy, for his failure to fully declare his property and business interests in the Oireachtas register of members’ interests, as an indictment of the inadequacy of our ethics legislation.

However, the Taoiseach takes a more nuanced view. In fact, you could say, his assessment is positively rose-tinted. When it comes to Ireland’s ethics legislation, Micheál Martin is firmly of the view we have a strong regime.

What is the evidence for this? The regularity with which the ethics legislation is breached.

“Quite a number of political representatives over the years haven’t always [got] the declarations fully right but they have amended them, and they have corrected them, and I think that in itself is a robust process,” he mused, to this newspaper on Monday.

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You really couldn’t make this up. Politicians’ lax attitude to complying with their obligations under ethics legislation, necessitating perennial late amendments of the register at various members’ discretion, is apparently evidence of a system that is working well.

Of course, a cynic could say it is a system that is working well – for politicians. This is especially true given there are no sanctions for failures to accurately complete the register on time.

Troy has now bowed to inevitability and resigned as minister, but he is not the first Oireachtas member to find himself at the centre of a political storm concerning his ethical obligations.

To give just one example, in 2019 there was uproar when it transpired former Fine Gael TD Dara Murphy had been travelling to Brussels to work for the European People’s party – which is affiliated with Fine Gael – for two years while claiming his full TD’s salary and expenses.#

[ Landlord politicians may be asked to declare housing contracts ]

[ Our TDs want to be landlords, so why doesn’t the State? ]

[ Troy departure: Ireland’s ethics regime needs an overhaul, but will the watchdog get the powers it needs? ]

The Standards in Public Office (Sipo) Commission stated it was unable to investigate complaints about Murphy’s double jobbing because he had resigned from the Dáil by the time those complaints were raised.

One of those most outraged by Sipo’s impotence at the time was then opposition leader Micheál Martin who was adamant the law should be changed so the State’s ethics watchdog could investigate complaints about Oireachtas members who subsequently leave office.

Clearly, Martin’s reforming zeal has waned in the interim given he now seems to believe our current ethics legislation, which fails to even administer a slap on the wrist to TDs who persistently flout the rules, is somehow “robust”.

This is the nub of the issue. Unless politicians are sanctioned for breaking the rules, there is no incentive to scrupulously adhere to those rules.

Regrettably, Sipo, in its current guise, is more lapdog than watchdog. This is no fault of the organisation. It has spent almost two decades pleading with successive governments to increase its powers of both investigation and enforcement. Those pleas have always fallen on deaf ears.

One only has to review its latest annual report, published at the start of this month, to see the extent to which Sipo has been screaming into the void on this issue. When it comes to ethics legislation alone, that report contains 18 separate recommended changes to bolster the law – some of which were first mooted as far back as 2003.

One recommendation – that Sipo should have the power to appoint an inquiry officer so it doesn’t need to wait until it receives a complaint to start a preliminary investigation – was first made in 2004.

Meanwhile, in 2017, two years before the Dara Murphy debacle, it recommended it be given the power to investigate former Oireachtas members. That didn’t happen and Sipo was powerless to investigate Murphy when he resigned.

Martin, in describing our current ethics regime as robust, unwittingly identified the root cause of the rot at the heart of our political system when it comes to standards in public office. There is an attitude not just of ambivalence but of defiance, at the highest level of government, to instituting a legal framework which has real teeth and can hold public officials to account.

Routine breaches

Senior Government Ministers profess to value the imposition of rigorous ethical standards for Oireachtas members, but when a controversy in which ethical obligations have been routinely breached erupts, the response is to minimise and to trivialise.

I have pored over both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste’s statements on Mr Troy’s travails, and while there is much lionising of his accomplishments as a “first class” minister, one sentiment is glaring by its absence – censure.

Martin and Leo Varadkar instead opted to highlight that Troy admitted he was wrong – a bare minimum, one would have thought – and emphasised their deep regret at his decision to resign.

A good man done in by a media with nothing better to do during August than examine TDs’ Sipo returns and a cynical opposition desperate for a political scalp seems to be the view from Government Buildings.

It should come as no surprise then that reform of our ethics legislation has not been prioritised by any government in 20 years.

Instead, all we get following successive controversies are vague promises of reform at some future point after some endless review. It’s the Augustinian approach to standards in public office – “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’

There is currently one of those lengthy reviews into our ethics legislation ongoing. But, if Sipo’s recommendations had actually been acted on, in the nearly two decades they have been making them, much of that review would be moot . And the public would have more confidence in a body politic that imposes high standards of accountability and transparency on itself.

This is not too much to ask given we, as politicians, expect high standards of others in the corporate world and elsewhere.

Catherine Murphy is joint leader of the Social Democrats