Professor David Farrell:

I think it gets to what Deputy Doherty was saying. The openness of our party funding regime needs to be looked at. An electoral commission that takes on the responsibilities that SIPO currently has and that has far greater teeth to really truly get to grips with how much money the parties are raising. We have this farce right now where year-on-year it seems that most of the parties in this country do not receive any funding from outside, when we absolutely know that the opposite is the truth. That is part of that culture of openness that I have been talking about that we need to address. An electoral commission that can actually get down to branch level accounts, fully audited accounts, and get to grips with the information on who is being seen by whom and who is funding whom. We are far from that.