Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

The current Taoiseach was the one who removed the ban on corporate political donations in the run-up to the last general election and who is now waxing lyrical about the need for political reform, transparency and all the rest.

Fine Gael has very serious questions to answer. People may want to know if there will be real action from this Government on the good recommendations made in the Mahon report about dealing with this endemic culture of corruption and sleaze. The Mahon report stated that if money and politics are insufficiently regulated, money can have a corrupting influence and lead to distortions in the democratic process. The report stated that bribes may be made in the guise of political donations and large donations may in themselves exert a corrupting influence. In other words, big money, in and of itself, from wealthy people and from corporations, in and of itself, may exert a corrupting influence. Everything that has happened in this country and all the corruption which has been revealed shows this to be the case and there can be no doubt that there is a connection. In the current climate of economic crisis where the response of this Government and the previous Government and indeed one might argue governments right across Europe to an economic crisis that is caused by greed, speculation and the drive for profit of corporate and financial elites, is to protect those corporate and financial elites, the same people who make the big donations to political parties, whether in this State or in another state, and to unload the cost of that economic crisis onto the backs of working people, the vulnerable, the poor, pensioners, young people and our public services. There is obviously a connection between those two things. The only way to deal with this is by rooting out and dismantling that rotten connection between big money, corporate influence and politics. All substantial political donations should be transparent.

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