Aideen Hayden (Labour)

I also welcome the Minister to the House. The Bill represents a reality. When we look for change we must see it as a continuum and not something to be achieved overnight.

I am concerned at the definition of "corporate", in the context of corporate donations. We seem to have taken a view that all corporate donations are wrong and evil. We need to take a step back from this. In the definition, corporate includes a trust. There are many trusts with charitable purposes or engaged with poor communities, marginalised groups, immigrants or women to encourage these marginalised groups to engage in politics. An unintended consequence of the Bill would be to outlaw the Women's Political Association, which was a key mover in the 1990s and early 2000s in encouraging the activation of women in politics. What are we talking about when we talk about banning corporate donations, trusts or unincorporated bodies of persons? We need to be careful when we talk about banning such "corporate donations" that we do not end up removing access to political engagement from disenfranchised groups in our society.

I am also somewhat concerned at the way the debate has gone. I took Senator Fiach Mac Conghail's point about the Moriarty report and corporate donations. The Moriarty report also said the removal of corporate donations from the political system had to be balanced by more public funding for the political system. Senator Ronán Mullen and others mentioned that a way around this rebalancing would be to have more private donations from individual citizens to support the political system. We have enough activation of the contented in our society without adding to that difficulty. More than 400,000 people are unemployed and 100,000 face the loss of their homes. If we move to a political system that is funded more by the individual and less by corporations the inevitable consequence will be that the funding of politics will come from people who have the most money and the best education, the middle class, white, middle income workers who have a particular agenda and tend not to want change.

We need to be careful when we tamper with the political system that we do not end up with a system that disenfranchise more of our citizens than are disenfranchised currently.