Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I will come back to this. My point is directly relevant to the amendment. Will Ministers stop using taxpayers' money to pay public relations consultancies to help them spin their message to the specific advantage of local election candidates running for those Ministers' parties? Of course they will not.

In the context of this section, what percentage of the spend incurred by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government in the two-month or three-month lead-in to the local elections, when he is trying to persuade people of the great merit of the policies he is implementing, will be attached to the spend of every Green Party candidate in the local elections to delimit the personal expenditure they can incur? The answer is none of it. What the Government wants — it suits it in the context of the current environment of political correctness where we live in a democracy but engaging in democratic activity which is not filtered by the national media is apparently a reserved sin — is to curtail the capacity of the candidates of the parties that oppose it or independent candidates to communicate directly to the electorate in the lead-in to the local elections their critique of Government and alternative message and policies.

The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government could decide two or three weeks prior to polling day in the local elections to hold a press conference to unveil some new environmental initiative the Government purports to take. Presumably this press conference would be organised with all of the consultancy and PR advice at the Minister's disposal to produce yet another glossy document to lie on the shelves of Government offices gathering dust and which would be forgotten after the election. Would the Minister's spend on this be factored in to what is being spent on Green Party local government candidates? It would not.

However, should a Fine Gael candidate in the local elections want to respond to this and put leaflets through doors to state the Minister's announcement was made four times previously, that the Government does not have the money to carry out the proposal and that it is an election gimmick, the Fine Gael candidate would be constrained financially in the cost of printing the leaflets or in their distribution if there were not sufficient volunteers to distribute them. If the candidate wanted to distribute them with speed because the Minister decided to hold that press conference three days prior to polling day and had to pay a professional organisation to distribute the leaflets, he or she would be stopped from doing so.

We are damaging the very fabric and foundations of our democracy under the guise of political correctness. This is a pretence at curtailing expenditure from candidates because the view is that very rich people or people who get more financial support than others should not be allowed to use it to get their messages across. By the time this Government is finished there will not be a rich person left in the country because of the economic disaster it created. However, one of the touchstones of political popularity and electoral support, in circumstances where rightly the donations that can be given by individuals are limited and where there is transparency with regard to donations, is the extent to which an individual manages to raise finance from other persons to support his or her campaign.

How many people in this House celebrated the success of the Obama campaign in raising funds by way of small donations in the 18 month lead-in to the United States presidential election? We thought that was a good thing. Looking at the disasters of the Bush Administration, some of us in this House silently cheered on Obama, as did others more vocally. He could not, under our democratic system, have run in a local election and raised any funds that were meaningful.

Let us be straightforward about this, a candidate who has limited capacities and abilities and not an original idea in his or her head will spend exactly the same money as a brighter candidate who has an original idea and a real message to get across. This is not democracy. I suggest to the Minister that whereas it is perfectly acceptable to require transparency of donations and to limit the amount of individual donations — although there could be some constitutional issues in regard to this — a major constitutional issue is raised with regard to curtailing an individual candidate in a democratic election in a parliamentary democracy in the amount of money he or she can spend from small donations raised to put across his or her message and to seek electoral support.

These issues have not yet been dealt with by our courts and they should be because this is wrong-headed. I am concerned that if there is supposed to be a compulsory party political spend identified within a candidate's expenditure, a large lump of it should be extracted from the spend of Government as it spins its way into the next election. This Bill is designed to disadvantage candidates from any party, not only from Fine Gael, who might want to oppose Government policy, get themselves elected and have the freedom to get their messages across.

We all know normal people from outside this House — none of us as politicians is entirely sane or normal; if we were we would do something different with our lives. We are obsessed by the minutiae of politics. We read it and talk about it and contribute to it to a point of complete and utter insanity. I suspect everyone in this House requires psychotherapy — I include myself in this — with regard to our obsession with the minutiae of politics. Ordinary people getting on with their lives are not that obsessed. Ordinary people facing major economic struggles have other issues that are more important to them and when it comes to an election one must grab their attention. If there is a message, one must repeat it and if one wants to connect with them one must make an effort to do so. In this modern age this requires funding.

I apologise for the length of my contribution but this is a serious issue. This is not a technical debate on a Bill which is okay financially. It has been already guillotined at one point and will be guillotined again at 1.30 p.m. This is about the very fabric of our democracy and the Minister is threatening to travel in a similar direction on Dáil elections. If he does, he should be challenged in the courts and the President should refer the Bill to the Supreme Court under Article 26 of the Constitution. I suspect that if this Bill were so referred, it could produce some very interesting judgments from the Supreme Court.

To what extent has the Minister obtained a detailed opinion from the Attorney General's office on whether this type of curtailing on spend as opposed to the raising of funds is damaging and possibly unconstitutional? To what extent has he considered or investigated whether it violates international treaties on human rights and political activities? We need to rethink where we are going with these types of limits in these circumstances. The Minister, before he got his anatomy into Cabinet on a seemingly permanent basis regardless of what disasters fall about his shoulders, may have discovered during past elections as the Green Party struggled to get a message across, that the party was overwhelmed by the type of communications that derived from Governments during the course of election campaigns, including those for local elections. The reason the Minister is there is not because too many people know anything about the detail of Green Party policies, it is because the green concept is a brand. Correctly, people are now environmentally conscious. People used to get — I emphasise "used to get" — a warm feeling in their tummies when they heard the Green Party existed and they hoped it might do something to improve the environment.

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