Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It was not introduced to support individual Members of Dáil Éireann. There are measures such as staff allocations for each Member and a substantial parliamentary standard allowance in place to provide assistance to individual Deputies. As I have said, the parliamentary activities allowance provides funding to political parties using the metric of the number of Deputies and Senators who were elected or nominated as members of each party at the time of election. We have to have some metric to decide how to allocate this party funding. It is done by the most recent vote of the people in terms of the number of Deputies and Senators elected. Again, this is the metric used for calculation purposes, not an allocation to individual Members.

I will go through it in some detail in a moment. It is not allocated to individual Members. It is a system that decides the weight with which the activities of a political party are supported. While some funding is allocated to those elected as Independent candidates, that is solely because they were elected as Independent candidates and not because they became Independents after the decision of the people in a general election.

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