The existing law on contributions to political parties is clearly defective, writes Garret FitzGerald
LAST WEDNESDAY'S Irish Timespublished in respect of last year's general election a complete listing of all payments to individual TDs that exceeded the €634 disclosure threshold. This list shows that individual sums in excess of that threshold, totalling about €600,000, were paid by almost 150 individuals and by over 250 companies to assist the election of 75 of our TDs.
This list accounts for only a fraction of the total spent during that election campaign, which includes several other categories of contributions. Leaving aside the sums contributed by individuals or companies to candidates who did not become TDs, there were, of course, the individual sums smaller than €634 contributed to TDs. But a far greater figure will have been the money spent on the election by the political parties themselves, drawn from resources raised by them through draws or other voluntary activities, as well as through gifts by individuals or companies to these parties that fell below the €5,078 declaration threshold.
We have no idea how much in total is spent on an election campaign or in advance of the campaign itself, but many millions are certainly involved.
The present system of financing elections involves dependence by political parties - principally Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - upon contributions from business interests, and, to a much lesser extent, dependence of Labour upon contributions from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, all of which could influence the approaches of these parties to issues in respect of which the general interests of business or trade unions might be engaged, to the detriment of the general public interest.
There is also the fact that, apart from the possible impact of such dependence upon political parties' general approach to public issues, there is the danger that parties that receive large contributions from specific business interests might subsequently be tempted to defer to these sectors - eg the construction industry.
This danger suggests that it would be desirable to insulate politicians from such influence by banning financial contributions to political parties or individual politicians from such interests, substituting these by State payments to parties for the purposes of elections. At one moment about 10 years ago we seemed to be coming near to such an outcome, but for some reason politicians then backed off.
The existing law in relation to contributions to political parties is clearly defective, for it requires only that donations of €5,078 or more to parties need be declared. We will learn in mid-May whether contributions in excess of that threshold were declared, but we will not know how many donations of just below €5,078 may have been made by businesses through separate companies within a group, with the result that the total amount of contributions being paid by some businesses may have exceeded €5,078 many times over.
The issue of donations to the election campaigns of individual politicians raises different but also potentially disturbing issues. For we now know that at certain points in the last two decades a small number of prominent politicians received large donations, over and above what they actually needed to spend in order to be re-elected.
Whatever the motivation of such payments may have been, the fact is that these politicians chose to treat and to describe these payments as "personal political donations". In such cases, general elections, instead of costing politicians money, could have been converted into sources of additional income.
From my experience as leader of a major political party for almost a decade, today's significant contributions to individual politicians at election times represent a quite new phenomenon. It used to be the case that the two main parties, normally fielding several candidates in each of our multi-seat constituencies, discouraged separate campaigns by individuals, which were seen as disruptive of party unity. So, the parties generally insisted that all spending at election times be organised by the local party itself.
There were occasional breaches of this discipline, in the form of "mé féin" sub-campaigns by ambitious candidates. But these occasional breaches were clamped down on firmly by the constituency election organisations, backed by the party at national level.
In some constituencies a combination of tight party discipline and the generosity of candidates who put the interests of the party before their own personal ambition even enabled seats to be won against the odds - as happened in Clare in the second 1982 election when Fine Gael won two out of four seats with less than one-third of the first-preference votes
After 1987, however, all this changed, in a manner that seems to have evoked remarkably little comment from political observers. A belief grew in political circles that better electoral results could sometimes be achieved by permitting competition between candidates of the same party, who then began to be allowed to raise funds to finance separate campaigns.
Why has that quite fundamental change in our political system escaped public notice? I think this may be because between general elections our national media concentrate their attention almost exclusively on party activity in the Dáil. It is only at election times that they look at the nitty-gritty of constituency politics - and then only at the micro-level of individual constituencies, rather than at what might be described as the macro-level of the overall working of our political party system, most of which consequently remains invisible to the public.
Perhaps our newspapers and electronic media should have political party correspondents as well as parliamentary correspondents?