Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Yesterday the Ceann Comhairle cautioned the House about the conduct of this debate while the Mahon tribunal is still hearing evidence and has yet to report on the matters which it is considering. The Green Party motion relates directly to the current hearings of the Mahon tribunal and it invites the House to draw conclusions about the evidence before the tribunal has reached its conclusions and has reported on them to the House.

Having established the tribunal, the House must allow it to independently carry out its investigations and to report to the House as it sees fit. We in this House cannot conduct our own parallel inquiry or reach parallel conclusions. We must resist pre-empting the conclusions of the tribunal, however politically tempting that may be. We must also be conscious that the current round of tribunal hearings are taking place in the period immediately before a general election, with the increased possibility of tribunal evidence being spun for political advantage. We must also recognise that our starting point today on this issue is quite different from what it would have been in the 1980s or early 1990s, which is the period principally being investigated by the tribunal.

When the Labour Party was last in government we worked to put in place a new regime for openness, transparency and accountability in political and public life. The rainbow Government, through my colleague, Deputy Howlin, introduced the new electoral legislation which limited spending on elections and which provided for the public declaration of political donations. We also introduced the freedom of information legislation which allows the public greater access to the previously secret side of public decision-making. That corpus of legislation has of course been amended over the years and it needs to be recalled that today, unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, it would simply be illegal to give or receive many of the payments, certainly the larger ones of £30,000 etc., because there are legal limits on the amounts of donations which can be given to or received by individual politicians or by political parties. Today, all payments such as those about which we hear from the tribunal would have to be publicly declared to the Standards in Public Office Commission and would be open to the press and to the public. Today, every donation of whatever amount given to a political party or to an individual politician must be lodged in a special account the details of which must be submitted to the Standards in Public Office Commission each year.

In addition, we all are individually required to make annual returns to the Standards in Public Office Commission detailing any interests we may have in land, shareholdings, directorships etc. which might even remotely affect or influence the discharge of our public duties. This is quite proper and it means that we should not in future need expensive tribunals to determine who got what from whom and when. That information should now be lodged with the Standards in Public Office Commission and be available to the public, and any politician or officer of a political party who fails to provide that information or who provides false information to the Standards in Public Office Commission can be prosecuted. As the House will be aware, there has been a recent successful prosecution for failure to disclose information to the Standards in Public Office Commission.

All these procedures are relatively new and they need to be kept under continuing review. That is why the Labour Party is proposing tonight that there should be an all-party committee to review these procedures and to make recommendations on any changes that may be required to update the legislation or regulations to ensure the highest possible standards of transparency and accountability in the funding of all political parties and all political activity.

Let us be clear about our objectives in this. There is no place for bribery, corruption or illegality in our democracy, in our public decision-making or in the funding of political activity. The question is, however, how does one achieve this objective. One way would be to ban all private funding of political parties and political activity and to allow only for the State funding of parties and of politics. This would probably be unconstitutional, however, since the constitutional right to organise probably includes the right to financially contribute to the organisation of one's choice. In any event, the exclusive State funding of politics would discriminate against new and emerging political movements since State funding would probably be based on performance at a previous election.

Another way, which the Labour Party advocated some years ago and on which we introduced a Private Members' Bill, would be to ban corporate donations to politicians and to political parties. In the course of the debate on that proposal, however, it was pointed out, with some justification, that that would not necessarily resolve the problem as it would prevent neither the directors nor the members of a company from individually contributing even greater amounts to an individual politician or to a political party, nor would it prevent the establishment of front donation bodies for the purpose of making such contributions.

The Green Party motion suggests that all parties should decline funding from developers as the mere acceptance of such moneys may be construed as showing an undue influence on development decisions. In my view this approach is not adequate. What, for example, does one do about political donations from somebody who is not a developer today but who may be next year or from somebody who has a material interest in a development or a development company which is not known to the recipient of the donation? What does one do about receiving a donation from somebody who has a material interest, not in promoting the development but in opposing the development, for instance, the owner of zoned land who opposes the rezoning of neighbouring land which might affect the value of his own?

Often Members on all sides of the House are asked to oppose particular developments because of the possible impact which they might have on property values or, indeed, on the commercial activity of competitors. About a year ago there was an issue — I do not want to mention the individual case — which was the subject of considerable discussion at the Joint Committee on Environment and Local Government, where we received considerable submissions from competing commercial interests on whether a particular type of development should proceed. A formula that bans the acceptance or making of contributions by developers would, for example, exclude the issue that arises in regard to competitors.

Our objective is straightforward. We want a planning system free of corruption and malpractice. Planning decisions at any level should never be based on bribery or corruption. Not all planning decisions, however, are bribed or corrupt nor are all political contributions but, clearly, lessons must be learned from the past nine years of investigation into planning and payments in Dublin by the Mahon and Flood tribunals. We need to put our collective intelligence together to draw on those lessons and put in place even better controls and safeguards. One way to deal with this might be to have within our public decision making process, whether that involves planning decisions at local government or national level, a requirement that those who make decisions should declare whether they have an interest in the application and whether a contribution has been made to them or their political party. The political donations are publicly declared anyway. If an issue arises in a local authority about a planning or rezoning decision and a member received funding during the previous election from an individual or company in that area, perhaps the way to deal with it is to have a requirement that the interest is declared before the debate, decision or vote takes place. An all-party group might usefully address such a suggestion to better deal with this issue.

I refer to the Government amendment, on which we will be required to vote later. The Labour Party cannot support it. As often happens, the Government amendment is self-serving. The Government is availing, wrongly, of the opportunity of a debate on a serious issue to clap itself on the back about its performance on planning, infrastructure, housing and related matters. The amendment is quite laughable. We are asked to commend the Government's commitment to implementing the national spatial strategy, which it abandoned as soon as it was published. The Government's so-called decentralisation plans completely ignore the strategy. The only time we hear about the strategy is when it is hauled out in the context of a motion such as this. It does not inform major planning and strategic decisions.

The amendment states the national spatial strategy is "informing the formulation of the next national development plan". The electoral requirements of the Government is the only factor "informing the formulation of the next national development plan". The next NDP will be unveiled piece by piece, constituency by constituency, project by project as the Government's manifesto for the 2007 election. When Ministers visit community halls, hotels and various other venues to make grand announcements in the company of the local Government election candidates, they will be spending the people's money. Expenditure on such projects is not the sole property of the Government parties.

The Government asks us to note its success with a range of housing supports to facilitate record housing output in the face of unprecedented demand. The Government abolished the first-time buyer's grant and it will not amend the rent allowance regulations to provide decent housing benefit, which will overcome the poverty trap experienced by many people in private rented accommodation. The so-called record achievement on social and affordable housing programmes is laughable. Less than 5% of housing output is built by local authorities, the worst record in the history of the State. Since Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 came into operation in 2001, 300,000 dwellings have been built in the State. Even if we generously allow that Part V would not have applied to half those dwellings because they were built on land that was not zoned for housing or they were one-off houses or they were built in units of less than five or on sites of less than 0.1 hectare, that leaves 150,000, 20% of which should amount to 30,000 social and affordable dwellings. At best approximately 2,000 such houses were built largely because in 2002 when Part V should have captured the planning permissions that were then extant, the Government caved into the construction industry lobby and handed back 80,000 affordable housing sites to the industry.

I welcome the proposal in the Green Party motion regarding the Kenny report on building land. This was the subject of a Private Members' Bill I introduced more than two years ago on behalf of the Labour Party. I proposed a formula for the compulsory purchase by local authorities or a national housing authority of building land in a way that would be constitutional and that would take out the element of speculation, which has contributed so much to the escalation in housing prices. At the time the Government responded that an all-party committee was examining this issue. It had been asked to do by no less a person than the Taoiseach who stated one of the major causes of high house price inflation was the cost of building land. The committee reported in April 2004 and the Government has done nothing to advance it. It took a year of questioning on my part and that of other Opposition spokespersons even to get the Government to debate the issue. It is clear the Government has no intention of dealing with the issue of the cost of building land and speculation on such land. Its failure to do so over the past eight or nine years means it will become more difficult to do so because any intervention by way of compulsory purchase, for example, of building land would mean local authorities entering at the top end of the market. The Labour Party will vote against the self-serving Government amendment put to the House.

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