Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)

I commend the Minister on bringing forward the Bill. It is positive, by and large. Some of its measures could go further, especially regarding political donations. As my party colleague, Deputy Niall Collins, said, we will be raising this matter on Committee Stage as the Bill progresses. The legislation, in its content and spirit, brings Irish politics in the right direction, if not as far as it should go.

The Bill deals with the two key areas of political funding and the chronic under-represenation of women in the political system. We must make strong efforts to bring about improvements in these two areas because of their importance to the system as a whole.

I am disappointed the Bill does not go further with regard to corporate donations, although the Minister has come a long way from where things were before now. I am sure it is tiresome for the Minister to have people remind him of the pledges in the Fine Gael election manifesto where, as my colleague has pointed out, Fine Gael committed to ban corporate donations entirely and to introduce the legislative and constitutional measures necessary to do that. We have often heard that party manifestos are subject to negotiation with coalition partners and that compromises are agreed to. We must take it that it was the influence of the Minister's Labour Party colleagues that caused him to water down his election promises, unless he had a complete change of heart, which would be totally out of character. I must presume the Labour Party was influential in this instance.

The €200 limit on corporate donations will place new and trenchant obligations on companies and corporations to provide details of their membership and shareholders as well as copies of company accounts and annual reports. The Bill requires details of donors to be included in a register to be published on the Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO, website, for each corporation to get the consent of its members for donations in excess of €200 and to publish all such donations in its annual report. Those changes will bring a significant sea-change to the level of corporate donations coming into the political system because it will make it more difficult for companies to make donations. That will be a healthy influence on politics because the influence of political donations in recent political history has been mostly negative. Tightening up the regulation of properly made donations, however, does not and cannot rule out the potential for more underhand and illegal donations to continue, but it will make it more difficult for that to happen and it will send a strong message on how politics should operate.

Ultimately, politics must operate on funding. Significant funding to the tune of millions of euro is given on an annual basis to the main parties. In recent years, up to €4 million or €5 million has been given to Fine Gael and similar levels of funding has been given to my party and the Labour Party. That is a by-product of introducing a system whereby we limit donations, but in as far as it is possible, the way we want Irish politics to operate is through a system of smaller donations from members of the general public because politics operates through the contributions of people, first by being a member of a party and then by getting out and campaigning for their preferred candidate at election time. I see nothing untoward with ordinary citizens making small contributions to political parties and their preferred candidates to fund the system, but it is critical that the amounts are small. The Minister could have gone further with the legislation in that regard.

It is unfortunate that gender quotas must be introduced and that we are at a juncture that legislation is required to force the issue and to bring about an improvement. In recent years there has been limited progress in terms of improving the gender ratio in Irish politics. In some ways the Bill is akin to taking a big stick to the table, but it will shake things up and lead to a definite change in the number of women that is elected.

It is interesting to focus on the statistics relating to the representation of women in politics and the electoral process in recent years. Historically, there appears to be a reduced success rate for female candidates in elections. In 1992, 18% of candidates were female but only 12% were successful in getting elected. The same statistics prevailed in 1997. Up to 2002, 18% of candidates were female and only 13% succeeded in getting elected. However, in the 2011 general election there was a significant change in that 15% of candidates were women, which was a much smaller percentage than in previous elections, but 15% of Deputies elected were female. Perhaps the result indicates a delayed representation in politics of what has happened in wider society in the past ten or more years whereby female participation in the workforce, in particular in many professions which had hitherto been male dominated such as medicine and law, has increased to the extent that a much higher proportion of women is entering both of those professions.

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