Dr. Elaine Byrne:

I went through a series of concerns that happened throughout that period. There was the Tully tribunal in 1975 that lasted two hours - the shortest tribunal in the history of the State. There was also serious allegations on the front page of the Sunday Independentby an outstanding investigative journalist called Joe MacAnthony. A lot of what we subsequently were to find out was already in the public domain in the 1970s.

In my chapter I argued that the national coalition - the Fine Gael-Labour coalition - and some of their actions, ensured that these things were not fully investigated. I remember interviewing the former Attorney General and High Court judge, Declan Costello, extensively about this. In the archives I found a memorandum he had sent to the Government. Around that time, in the UK, they were looking at introducing conflict of interest legislation. Mr. Costello brought this to Cabinet, he sat at Cabinet at that time. The UK introduced much of the legislation which subsequently came into being in the mid-1990s, particularly around conflict of interest but there was a reluctance to introduce it here, and Mr. Costello was very frustrated at that. Twenty or 30 years later he was still noticeably frustrated that the Government, despite very obvious scandals happening, chose not to introduce legislation which would have regulated some of this behaviour.

I think the point the Senator has made is that in the 1970s something happened in Ireland that had not happened before, and that was to do with population changes. There were more people living in urban Ireland, for the first time, than there was in rural Ireland and one had this pressure on cities that one did not have before. More people wanted to move into cities, more people wanted planning permission and the existing system was not structured for that demand. A way of getting around that demand and delays in getting planning permission and facilities was that people tended to give money for planning permission or for certain facilities.