Billy Timmins (Wicklow, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is important to remember that notwithstanding that we cannot borrow, we must be responsible in what we do. Throughout my time in this House I have grown tired of the Opposition consistently looking for expenditure and being very reluctant to outline how to gather in taxes other than the simplistic approach of taxing the wealthy by imposing a levy on everybody with incomes in excess of €100,000. By and large, we have a fairly progressive tax system.

I also get a bit weary of hearing about political reform, but it is in the context of trying to make the system better so that when we are gathering money from the public and spending that money we can do so in an efficient and progressive manner. Reference was made to Irish Water and the Minister spoke about the freedom of information going back to July of last year. When that legislation was going through here why did we not allocate enough time to debate it? Why did people not listen to the concerns Members had? I believe that establishing Irish Water as a statutory authority is a very worthwhile exercise. We would never have got our national road network in place without the National Roads Authority and I envisage Irish Water doing something similar. Even though there are many efficiencies in local authorities, all one has to do is to look at the various websites and see all the boil notices. It is impossible to put in major utility infrastructure on a local authority basis or to get co-ordination without having one authority. I would have been an advocate of a national housing authority some years ago, but I am not so sure if it is needed now; it has been fairly successful in Northern Ireland. However, it is not appropriate for Roscommon County Council and Westmeath County Council to put in separate systems when they could combine together and put in one system. So I am an advocate of it and I believe it is a very good policy.

I am in favour of the basic principle of water charges, but owing to the manner in which we introduced it we have now undermined the positives of that body. Already the public in their minds have equated Irish Water to the HSE with the view that it is overstaffed, that people, who should not be paid, are being paid, and that it has spent too much money on consultants. That is all because it was not subject to the scrutiny and openness that should have applied.

For many years I took unvouched expenses; I changed to vouched expenses for a period before the last general election. While Members claiming the unvouched expenses got less money, it was more convenient for me to take unvouched expenses because I did not have to keep a record of things and I found it easier to operate. Political life is difficult enough and most politicians are very good at looking after everybody else's business but poor at looking after their own. It did not suit me to do it. However, now it has gone to the other extreme.

While I welcome accountability, etc., when I see the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government in conflict with the Standards in Public Office Commission - I am not blaming the Minister - I am reminded that we are supposed to be on the same side. This was done for accountability. Often the bodies we establish take their job too seriously. I do not use the term too lightly - it is not what I actually mean. Many years ago I studied law and the one thing I remember is that the British system - most of our law is based on the British system - had the golden rule and the mischief rule. The golden rule was that people interpreted legislation as per the intention of the legislation. If that meant going into the Committee Stage or the Report Stage of the legislation to understand the actual intention, that is what they did. However, in this country, particularly in recent years there seems to have been a move to the mischief rule by bodies and the Judiciary whereby they look at the legislation and try to arrive at an interpretation of the legislation that was not the intention of the Legislature. I have seen this when trying to find out if a certain individual had been treated fairly on the local authority housing list and running into data protection obstacles.

One cannot find out. This is equally true of political parties.

When I was a member of the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party I sometimes wondered where the funding went. I recall once hearing that someone got a job in a political party, which I will not name. It was a new position and some months later I rang to speak to that individual and was put through to the individual’s secretary. The pyramid was being built quite rapidly. Public money should all be available on the website, if there is no commercial sensitivity as for most of it there is not. The money a political party or an individual gets should be published on the site and every last cent spent should be published in so far as possible, while making allowances for some miscellaneous items. I do not like the idea of auditors arriving on my doorstep, or anyone's doorstep, to find out the mischief in the expenditure. Many politicians do not claim for things because they fear they will get into trouble and they bin the receipt.

I have raised an issue about expenses for politicians with three or four Ministers for the Environment, Community and Local Government in the past. Politicians’ expenses grew rapidly in the decade of the Celtic tiger. Thirty years ago the politician’s mother, sister, brother or wife hand wrote letters late at night, working for no money. Most of the politicians who came in here would have lost out financially. I do not expect any newspaper to report it, and I do not expect Joe Duffy to have me on “Liveline” lamenting this. They lost out because there are expenses and demands on a politician, as there are on anyone in business, for which he or she cannot claim. They are hard to discern and a bit intangible. It is hard to administer but we should consider limiting expenditure between elections. There is the disadvantage that the person outside the system can spend ad infinitum.

If I have access to a great deal of money or raise funds, which I can still do, for example, if I sponsor football teams, that is a form of buying votes. If we were allowed a discretionary expenditure between elections, capped at, for example, €2,000 a year, it would take away the need that some people feel to raise funds. I appreciate that this does not come under the heading of expenses. It would also mean that people would not put pressure on for wage increases because much of a politician’s wage goes on items that cannot be claimed as expenses. If they were in the public domain people would have no pity and call it buying votes. Unfortunately, the pressure of work and the nature of the environment in which we work requires this. This does not happen in some constituencies where people try to have arrangements. I once gave what I thought at the time was a substantial donation to a student for a project. Several months later, however, I heard the student was deeply unhappy with it because another politician had given a donation which was a multiple of mine. I did not lament the bad press but I lamented having given the money in the first place because it had only got me into trouble. If I had not given it at all, I might have my reputation and my few bob.

Without deviating too much from the legislation, I can purchase out of my own pocket 1,000 posters, as Deputy Mathews did. I have not seen it but I am told that there is a very attractive poster of him in the vicinity of Dublin 2-----

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