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

I was not surprised but I was completely nauseated by the "RTE Investigates" special on corruption. It was quite stunning to see a Fianna Fáil councillor, a Fine Gael councillor and a pro-business Independent involved in the sort of grubby corruption - there is no other word for it - that they were attempting to engage in.

It is worth remembering the cost of this for society. It is this kind of behaviour that contributed significantly to the economic collapse of this country because much of the political system was held hostage by the interests of developers who, directly or indirectly, had captured it. The interests of society as a whole or ordinary citizens went out the window in the grubby drive for profit assisted by politicians who were essentially in the pockets of developers, banks, etc., who were seeking to profit to the absolute maximum.

The Mahon tribunal reports and commentary suggested that many councillors were screaming foul about many of the development plans and the corruption going on around them, but they were told to shut up whenever they made accusations that they had been approached by developers or that they believed corruption was going on. An overwhelming part of the body politic, certainly at a local level, did not want to talk about it and wanted to hush it up. I do not know how many were involved but I think it was widespread, and that there was a widespread tolerance of it.

We had a small example of this in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown in the past year when one of our own councillors was approached by a developer who was trying to get rezoning for a development he was trying to push through. It was in the balance in the council. We do not know how many other councillors he approached, but we know he was rebuffed in our office. When he did not get any commitments on the rezoning, he made an offer to pay the election expenses of one of our councillors. The councillor then went into the council chamber and stated this publicly, at which point there was pandemonium with all the usual suspects of the main parties, particularly Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, stating that one is not allowed say that. Subsequently, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council took down the footage of the meeting where the allegation was made. This is the sort of stuff that is still going on. When I, as a councillor, was doing the county development plan in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and a series of dodgy rezonings was proposed that was clearly in the interests of big private developers for shopping centres, land rezonings or whatever, one could not get one's head around how anybody would support these matters and yet there were councillors in the council chambers supporting them. One Labour Party councillor said to me in a little aside that this is how they would get their election expenses paid. It was an interesting comment. It is exactly the same as what was said to our councillor by this developer. This is the stuff that is going on and it is absolutely rank.

This is not only going on at local level. Deputy Twomey said that it is different at local authority level or with officials doing procurement, but it is not really in the Dáil. I do not accept that at all. The fish always rots from the head. I will give two examples of where there is no will whatsoever at the highest level to go after corruption. For the past few years, there has been no action from the mainstream parties on doing anything about the tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance of the big multinational corporations, which everybody has known about for the past few years, and have every reason to believe they actively facilitated the same tax evasion. Similarly, in the abuse of bogus self-employment and the relevant contract tax, RCT, system in the construction sector, which some of us have been shouting about for years and saying it simply stretches any credibility that three quarters of all building workers on building sites are self-employed contractors, the Government still claims there is no problem. Nothing is done about it because it benefits the State to have these workers so exploited because it gets cheap schools or housing built. The fish rots from the head and we need serious action to deal with that corruption.

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