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

I am talking about serious limits on electoral spending, full disclosure of the origin of donations and severe limits on the amounts individuals or corporations may donate to political parties. Those disclosures should be made before elections or in the period of the election so political parties disclose where the money to finance their election manifestos comes from. This would allow people to have full knowledge of what they are voting for and whom the political parties represent when they put themselves forward in elections.

Those are measures which would go some way towards dealing with the endemic culture of political corruption that has blighted this society and this State. In my view and following from what the Mahon report states, there will always be a substantial degree of corruption of the political process where there are gross inequalities in wealth in society in the first place. If, as is the case, 5% of the population in this country owns more than 40% of the wealth, it is inevitable that they will use that wealth to corrupt the political process. It is the inequality in the distribution of wealth, the lack of social and economic equality in our society, which inevitably corrupts the political process. Therefore, part of dealing with the culture of political corruption is to achieve a more equal society, to have things like wealth taxation and progressive taxation which redistributes the wealth in our society in a fair way-----

See this speech in context