Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

On those different elements I went through with Mr. Coughlan, it would be interesting to take all the figures, break them down individually and in respect of the unvouched elements, including travel, put the figures together and total them to see how much money is exiting the system without adequate accountability and an adequate paper trail and, in respect of the costs of the committees and the cost of Whips, to break the figures down thematically and give them back to us in that form. I would find that very useful.

I wish to raise one final matter with Mr. Watt regarding the party leader's allowance. Understandably, hard-pressed taxpayers would question the existence of a party leader's allowance. If we are going to reform politics and phase out corporate donations with all the negativity that brings, the party leader's allowance becomes all the more central in terms of funding democracy but, as with other things, it must be accounted for. It jumps out as very odd that the allowances paid to each of the political parties must be accounted for, which is as it should be, but that payments made to Independent Deputies and Senators are not scrutinised in the same way. Can Mr. Watt explain this system of payments to Independent Deputies and Senators and how much they account for in total? I might be wrong on this and perhaps there is a system for scrutinising how much is paid and where that money is spent.