Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

The Private Members' motion before the House this evening in the name of my party colleague is one of the few opportunities we have had in the 29th Dáil to either bring forward Private Members' legislation or bring to task what we believe are poor standards in the Government's day-to-day operations and in upholding the standards of public life in general. In all the Private Members' time my party has had in this Chamber we were fortunate to have won the support of other Opposition parties and Independent Members of this House. We welcome any process whereby motions we put down are subject to amendment because, unlike others in this House, we do not operate on the maxim of knowing what we know and knowing more than others. On those grounds we look with interest on amendments that have been tabled to our motion by other Opposition parties. They appear to suggest other routes of achieving the same objective and we would be open to such discussions.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a quibble with some of the wording in our substantial motion and I take this opportunity of putting those quibbles to rest. Our motion condemns those parties that have failed to discipline their members. It is fairly accepted that one party more than others has been predominant in all this process but it is also an established fact that other political parties have chosen to discipline their members by other means. There have also been parties of Government during this period which have not done so.

There appears to be a difficulty with the part of our motion that states that funding should be declined from developers. I note in the Labour Party amendment it is willing to set up an all-party grouping to look at means by which all political party funding is examined. We would be prepared to go down that road but in terms of the most recent political history of this country and political decision making, both at local and national level, in the way property developments proceed here, it would be a statement of intent, and not to wait for decisions made in other places, that all political parties in this House would decide that particular types of donations from particular types of corporate entities should no longer be accepted. If other parties have difficulties with that, that is something they need to examine in terms of their own decision making processes.

I share the views of my two party colleagues who opened the debate on the motion regarding the points we are trying to make. It is unfortunate that in the nine years of the lifetime of this intertwined mono-Government, regardless of its intention to appear to be some type of coalition, there has been no attempt to bring forward reforms in this area. There have been no attempts to tackle the culture that existed then and may even exist, albeit on a smaller scale, today. In particular there has been no attempt by the head of the Government to discipline members who have, by public utterances, deviated from what should be normal, accepted standards of public life. Such individuals, when they have been caught out in the nature of their behaviour and the standard of their public representation, still find themselves members of a parliamentary party supporting the interests of the Government and keeping such a Government in power. It is our duty as an Opposition party to question the inconsistency and even the immorality of the lack of action in that area. On these grounds, this Governments stands indicted. The substantive Government amendment is several times longer than the Green Party motion and is nothing other than a sea of verbiage. The Minister makes no attempt to defend the poor standards for which his Government has been responsible.

Our party is not confident that the Government will take on board anything from our motion but we feel confident that the reality of those poor standards in public life will hit home in the coming general election when the electorate makes its decision.

See this speech in context