Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Ms Kennedy knows that before political parties were subject to limits on the donations they could receive, beef barons, property developers and banks made substantial donations to them. Those same political parties loudly protested that those donations had absolutely no effect on their policies or how they might deal with issues in Government but nobody believed them. Should they believe newspapers when they say that massive advertising revenue of that order would have absolutely no influence on how those newspapers dealt with the property bubble, for example, and the issues that it raised regarding developers, speculation, profiteering and so forth?