Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

The purpose of the Ethics in Public Office (Amendment) Bill 2007 is to require officeholders and Oireachtas Members not to accept gifts or loans worth in aggregate more than €2,000 in a calendar year from a friend for personal reasons without obtaining the opinion of the Standards in Public Office Commission that acceptance would not be likely to materially influence the recipient in the performance of his or her functions or duties.

Regarding the question of what threshold for disclosures to the Standards in Public Office Commission should apply, a balance must be struck. On the one hand, the figure needs to be small enough to be meaningful as an ethics requirement and, on the other, it needs to be large enough so that officeholders and Oireachtas Members do not need to spend time counting every ordinary gift from friends. It also needs to be large enough to avoid making the Standards in Public Office Commission deal with applications concerning gifts worth less than the set amount.

The threshold has not increased since the Ethics in Public Office Act 1995, apart from a change to a convenient euro amount during the euro changeover in 2002. The threshold set in the Act was the first attempt to set thresholds in this area. It is by no means unreasonable for the first attempt to be revised 13 years later in light of experience, not to mention the need to counterbalance the effects of inflation eroding the true value of the original figure in the intervening years. In addition, the world in which we live is different from that of 1995. While €2,000 is not an insignificant amount, it is the opinion that the Bill, when enacted in 2008 or 2009, will set the amount for the coming years. Increasing the threshold in these circumstances is reasonable.

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