Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

In over 3,200 pages there is no mention of Deputy O'Dea and the only mention of former Deputy Roche is his signature on revised terms of reference.

I do not accept that Ministers had no right to criticise the workings of the tribunal. There is a difference between legitimate criticism and trying to collapse it. It was not a Minister but a judge of the Supreme Court who used words like "grotesque" and "nothing less than appalling" to describe the cost and duration of the tribunal.

While I am happy with how the report deals with a donation I received at the tribunal, a wild and unfounded accusation was made against me. The allegation was later withdrawn and the accuser apologised. However, the accusation was left hanging for days and I criticised the tribunal for allowing that to happen. Given that my criticism is now a core part of Fine Gael's attack strategy, I hope its Deputies will take the time to reflect on the fact that the party made exactly the same criticism of the Mahon tribunal for a similar occurrence. On 4 July 2006 Fine Gael issued a press release attacking the tribunal for the "outrage and disgrace" of letting an untrue allegation be made without being challenged. Fine Gael was right in this criticism and I was right in mine.

Fine Gael backbenchers who are enjoying this particular spot on the moral high ground should reflect on the fact that the Minister, Deputy Hogan, threatened to close down the Moriarty tribunal, in which he was a key witness, if he became a Minister. The Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, actually introduced a resolution to collapse the Smithwick tribunal.

I accept the report and welcome the work of the Mahon tribunal. However, it is not immune from legitimate criticism and others have no right to announce that they know who is being criticised in a comment where no one is named and which is not a finding of fact.

During the Moriarty debate last year, the Government parties followed a strategy of deliberately seeking to minimise the significance of the report. They claimed it was all about one rogue Minister and ignored all inconvenient evidence. To this day the Government has not said if it agrees with the findings. That is an extraordinary situation. On the Mahon report it has taken the opposite approach, by demanding agreement not only with the findings, but also to their claims of what the findings are.

The Mahon report is a serious indictment of many people who held office at every level of public life. It involves individual cases of corrupt and inappropriate behaviour. Equally, it shows there was a fundamental question about even the legal funding of politics.

I accept the findings against members of my party and we will continue to work to address these findings. What I will not accept is hypocrisy and double standards. I will not accept the right of the parties who control this House to be selective in the evidence they point to when speaking about past abuses or to demand accountability for others while refusing legitimate questions about their own party's record.

In the past 12 months no Fine Gael Minister has acknowledged that it was wrong to seek and accept major donations from a company which was competing for the largest commercial licence ever awarded by the State. The Taoiseach has lectured at length about standards but has repeatedly refused to answer direct questions about whether it was correct to seek and accept these donations. In the debate last year he ignored a series of questions by me and Deputy Catherine Murphy about serious matters.

Last week's events in the USA are only a reflection of the government's indifference to and dismissal of the Moriarty report. With other reports the Government rightly demands accountability and contrition but for Moriarty, when the question is about its own conduct, it says legislative plans are enough. Nobody on the Government benches can be found to issue even a word of criticism of what happened under Fine Gael and the Labour Party. Deputy Broughan is the only Member in either party to stand up and criticise the targeted fund-raising around that second mobile telephone licence. As the Minister of State, Deputy Creighton, pointed out yesterday, many are uncomfortable with the behaviour of the Government but nobody is willing to do anything about it.

Since Moriarty was published I am not aware of any serious effort to question the Taoiseach or Ministers about whether they thought their fund-raising was appropriate. Questions about relations with Mr. O'Brien have been belated and limited. While the Government's efforts to minimise Moriarty are clearly political, the reluctance of some of our media to follow it up in any sustained way is more disturbing. It is not possible to argue it received the sort of attention the seriousness of its findings requires. More striking has been the lack of any concerted defence of those journalists who are being targeted through legal action. My party does not have many friends in the media in recent times-----

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