Paddy McHugh (Galway East, Independent)

I am glad of the opportunity to speak on this motion and thank the Green Party for raising the issue. It is timely and appropriate that as legislators we should discuss the actions of some of our Members, which can at best be described as suspect. Seven political parties are represented in the Dáil and it is appalling that Members of four of those parties have admitted receiving substantial payments in dubious circumstances from developers, their agents or bagmen.

Members of Fianna Fáil, the Progressive Democrats, Fine Gael and the Labour Party have all admitted to accepting money from people who subsequently found themselves under investigation. This is a damning indictment of all those political parties who at one time or another formed the Government. So much for standards in high places and accountability. Why can our main political parties not be straightforward, old-fashioned and honest? The smaller party's claim that it must be in Government to keep an eye on the bigger party is bogus. The glaring truth is that they are all the same.

Is it any wonder that the two parties in Government, Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, are not prepared to condemn those parties that have, in the words of the motion, "failed to discipline their members for their collective amnesia with regard to monies received from developers and their agents at the time of wide-scale rezonings by local authorities"?

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