Lucinda Creighton (Dublin South East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Correct. So Fine Gael and Labour have received what are, effectively, top-ups in the amount of almost €600,000 in respect of Deputies who are no longer members of their parliamentary parties. Neither party can claim that they can legitimately spend those funds in the names of the Deputies in respect of whom they were allocated. Almost €600,000 in top-ups is being paid by the taxpayer to the headquarters of both parties in respect of Deputies who are no longer members of those parties. The position is the same with regard to certain Members of the Seanad.

Despite a budgetary adjustment of almost €9 billion in expenditure cuts, tax increases, reductions in public sector pay, etc., in 2011 and 2012, Exchequer funding for the political parties in Government actually increased in order that they might oversee that adjustment. I find that repulsive. Given that there are no compliance procedures in respect of accounting, that party accounts are not published and that the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, is trying to obfuscate in the interests of ensuring that he can circumnavigate the SIPO recommendation with regard to accounting at branch level, we have no idea how the funds to which I refer are being spent. Thanks, I presume, to the same Minister, we have been given a little hint as to what is involved. Deputy Naughten alluded to this when he referenced an article written by Niamh Horan and Fionnan Sheehan which appeared in the Sunday Independent on 19 January. The article quoted a so-called senior Fine Gael source and indicated that the latter had stated that he is making every effort to have me and other Deputies who left or were expelled from the party replaced at the next general election. The source also said that all available resources will be dedicated to this task.

It is not just the case that the funding being received by the two parties in Government in my name and in those of Deputies Terence Flanagan, Naughten, Shortall and others is being retained. A senior source within one of those parties, Fine Gael, has acknowledged that some of it will be used to try to manipulate taxpayers - whose money it is in the first instance - to vote in a particular way at the next general election. That is a complete manipulation and distortion of the democratic process which obtains in this country. I must question the position of the senior Fine Gael source to whom I refer. I read about this individual a great deal in the national newspapers. I have spoken to political correspondents who very openly informed me of the identify of this source. If that source spent more time in his ministerial office micromanaging the funds he says he does not have time to micromanage and less time spinning to the media and trying to manipulate the internal workings of a certain political party, he would be doing a much greater service to the taxpayers and other citizens of this country than is the case at present.

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