Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I was listening to the Minister's introduction upstairs. It struck me that there is a fundamental difference between the Minister's view of lobbying and People Before Profit's view of lobbying. That explains why we have quite a limited reform here. It is a tiny step in the right direction but is quite limited and inadequate. The Minister said that lobbying is an invaluable part of politics which provides an invaluable insight for politicians about the details and workings of things and so on. He really extolled the virtues of lobbying. Fundamentally, I do not agree with that. Part of how that case is made is by throwing it all in together. The football club that contacts a Deputy or a councillor about a pitch that needs to get fixed is put in the same category as the major multinational corporation paying tens or hundreds of thousands of euro to former Deputies or Ministers to lobby for changes in their interests. They are not the same thing. They are fundamentally different. There is something fundamentally different between the kind of campaigning and informing done by ordinary people, community groups, sports groups, trade unionists, etc., and what makes up the vast majority of lobbying as a business. We have to remember that that is what this is.

Lobbying is a multibillion euro industry on an EU-wide basis, and a multimillion euro industry in this country. The purpose of that lobbying, which, again, is the vast majority of the lobbying by value and in terms of the money spent on these things, is to shape laws in the interests of particular, defined and discrete business interests to try to make sure their interests are represented. They spend money on this, billions of euro on a worldwide basis, because they think it works. If they did not think it worked in shaping laws, they would not spend the money.

One must presume that these individuals, who are hard-headed business people, have the evidence to show that it is worth spending multiple millions of euro or dollars to get their way and that it has an impact, in that the legislation that results in the areas of the environment, labour, planning and consumer rights is, at least to some degree, affected and shaped in the interests of those who are paying to try to do so. That is fundamentally undemocratic. It is fundamentally about those who have economic power using that economic power to ensure they also have political power. This is not something that is open to community groups, local residents in an area, trade unionists and ordinary people. The difference is that these people have the money to spend millions on lobbyists. This is why I take a much more dim view of the role of lobbying in this political system.

It was Connolly who wrote that "governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class". The right-wing governments that generally pursue the interests of managing the affairs of the rich, the 1% in our societies, do not necessarily know the exact details of what different sections of the capitalist class want. The role of lobbying is, fundamentally, to inform them of that. It is to transmit the direct interests of big business to government.

I have made this point here before but it bears repeating. There is a reason the lobbying companies to employ former Ministers and former Deputies as lobbyists. I mean no offence to the people individually, but it is not because they have particular aptitudes or intelligence set up for lobbying. That is not the reason. Very clearly, the reason is precisely because they are former Ministers or Deputies, political insiders who have access both physically and metaphorically. It is worth pointing out that if the lobbying companies did not think it was worth their money to employ former politicians, they would not do it. They obviously feel that this access means something.

Let us consider the examples. Brian Hayes went from being a Fine Gael MEP to the head of the banking lobbyists organisation. Even more blatantly, Michael D'Arcy went from being the Minister of State with responsibility for the financial sector to being the CEO of the Irish Association of Investment Managers. There is a reason those people are chosen. It is not a personal criticism of those people to say that it is not about some inherent talent or skill. It is about the job they previously had and, therefore, the access. The point is that when the Government-----

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