Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

Tá áthas orm deis a bheith agam cupla focal a rá faoin ábhar fíor-thábhachtach seo. I am delighted to have an opportunity to speak on this issue.

I am disappointed the Government cannot accept the Second Stage of this Bill. If it did accept the Bill, it would have six months to replace it with a Government Bill. This would put a time limit on the Government's efforts. Much work has been done already on this Bill, much of it during the term of the previous Government. Contrary to constant media reports, there was no difficulty in the Fianna Fáil Party with dealing with this issue. We agreed it had to be dealt with, but we had to deal with some legal issues which have been well outlined today.

Laws should not be there to trip people up. We have all read historical accounts of how the innocent were caught and the guilty got away because the law was so complex that ordinary people did not understand it. It is time we simplified and codified this legislation in a new way. Even the fact that the monetary limits are in odd amounts, because they were set in the days of the Irish pound, needs to be dealt with.

I have always had a slight reservation about banning corporate donations completely. This is because of something that happened once, totally innocently. An event was being organised locally with a subscription of €100. That is not a huge amount of money in any person's language. I happened to notice that one of the cheques was in the name of an individual. The person had a private business and, obviously, wrote the cheque on the company account, because "Teo." was written after the individual's name. It would take a fairly sharp person to realise that it was, technically, a corporate, and not a private, donation. That is the kind of tripping up of an innocent action that we must avoid.

My preoccupation was never with whether a donation came from a corporate or private source but with the amount of money involved. The Bill makes very good steps in that regard. For example, it proposes reducing the total amount one can give to a party to €2,500 and the amount above which one would have to publish to €1,000. The maximum donation from an individual would be €1,000 and the amount above which one would have to publish would be €500. These are modest amounts of money and are realistic. No matter how little a party receives, it must account for it in its donation statement. Therefore, this is a step in the right direction. It is balanced, as it must be.

On the other hand, we all go to party meetings. Someone might pay a membership fee of €5 or put €20 in the bucket at a church gate collection. When Fine Gael recently had their national collection, Fianna Fáil people coming out the church would not pass the Fine Gael collectors without putting a few euro in the bucket. I often saw Fine Gael people putting money in our bucket, because they respected people's involvement in politics and were mature about what was going on. The idea that one would have to declare every euro donated, which seems to be the demand in the media, is unrealistic. The idea that someone who throws a fiver into a bucket is likely to hugely influence the political system is bizarre.

Therefore, we need limits under which a declaration is not required. What we propose is reasonable. I would have no problem declaring every donation. I do not take political donations. The last €50 euro went into my political donations statement account five years ago. That is my decision. It is how I operate. On the other hand, I have, quite legitimately, passed money on to the party that was given to me for the party. The limits we propose are operable and reasonable.

Another issue must be dealt with. The difficulty of multiple donations can arise, especially with people who have their own personality and a good number of companies. Such a person could try to circumvent the law by giving large sums of money to several parties, spend quite a bit of money keeping in with all sides and donate to the very limit. That type of multiple donation should be dealt with forthwith, and it is addressed in the Bill.

I would like to touch on the issue of the publication of the accounts of political parties. Our own party, for some reason I can never understand, traditionally has not published all its financial affairs. Whatever justification there might have been in times gone by, and I do not know what it was, it is not justifiable today. We live in a totally different atmosphere. The idea that all political parties would publish their accounts is reasonable and practical. I have one caveat, being practical about this issue. Most of us have a central party, and it should publish its accounts. We also have local branches. In my constituency there are 80 branches - we call them cumainn - eight comhairlí ceantair and a comhairle dáil cheantair. One must multiply that across the country. How could a party get down to every last fiver given to a local branch and get it all together in some super account? I do not know how good other parties are at getting their guys to fill in all the fivers donated at the AGM. We normally charge a fiver. In the midlands I know it is often more, because they are richer than we are in the west.

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