Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has been caught. He tried to cover this up when the allegations were put to him in 2017. Last year, he again tried to cover this up when the media made inquiries with specific detail on all of this with regard to the political donation. The Minister claimed at the time that he reviewed this issue, there was nothing to see here and everything was in order. Now he has concocted a story that does not stack up.

The charge is that during the 2016 general election campaign, the Minister received a political donation from his friend, Michael Stone, CEO of Designer Group and then president of the Construction Industry Federation, who was later appointed by Fine Gael to the powerful Land Development Agency, LDA, outside of the normal process. The Minister failed to disclose this donation, which was required of him under law. The donation accepted by the Minister was above the legal limit.

In the past five years, the Minister has dodged this issue and concocted stories to make it go away. He said the individuals did the work for him over a number of nights, so the work was carried out outside normal working hours. We now know that is not true.

We now know that the work was carried out in broad daylight, in the middle of the working day, by men in hard hats with a company van marked Designer Group. The Minister claims that this was a donation to the party rather than himself. That is laughable. He should know this because he is the Minister who oversees this legislation. The rules are clear. I will quote them to the Minister. They state: "Where expenses are incurred on a candidate's behalf by an individual or body other than a political party ... and the expenses are borne by the individual/body, the expenses may be regarded as a donation to the candidate." It is a donation to Deputy Paschal Donohoe, not to Dublin Central Fine Gael. It is crystal clear and the Minister should stop trying to dodge that issue.

The Minister tried to reverse engineer the value of the political donation to make sure it was below the allowable amount. He said the donation was worth €1,100, but the problem for him is that the rules are crystal clear. They state: "Donations in kind ... are to be valued at the usual commercial price charged for the purchase, use or acquisition of the property or goods or the supply of any service donated." It is not about how much Michael Stone paid the individuals to do the work but the commercial value on the open market. How does the Minister's claim of €1,100 square with somebody who was contesting the same election in the same constituency, Senator Mary Fitzpatrick, who had to pay nearly €5,000 to get her posters put up and taken down? Many of the Minister's colleagues, sitting behind him, paid €2,500 to just get posters put up. That is the reality of the amount of the donation that the Minister failed to disclose. It was an unlawful donation that the Minister is still trying to cover up.

In an attempt to make the numbers add up, the Minister claimed that these people were only putting up 150 posters over three nights. As we can see from the photographs, they were putting up posters two to a pole. The Minister is good with numbers. That would be 75 poles, which would mean they were putting posters up on two poles per hour. Who is seriously going to believe that? The Minister and I should grab a ladder and a stopwatch to see how many posters we can put up. What the Minister is trying to do is laughable. He is trying to take us for fools with regard to these concocted stories. He refused to come clean in 2016 and again when it was pointed out to him in 2017. When the media went after him about this in November last year, he said there was nothing to see here. It is only now that SIPO has started to inquire about this that the Minister is concocting a story.

The Minister should be answering questions but he voted earlier not to answer direct questions. They are serious questions. Who did Michael Stone offer this service to? He is the Minister's friend. The Minister was at his wedding in November. He is a close confidant of the Minister. It is natural for him to offer the Minister this donation. In 2017, who brought it to the Minister's attention that the company van was used in 2016? Who made that allegation? What action did the Minister take? How did he value the use of the van? How many days was the van used for and for how many hours each day?

In 2021, when a number of journalists made specific, detailed inquiries of the Minister regarding the issue which is now in the public domain, the Minister said he carried out a review and that all was in order. Who carried out the review? How did the Minister satisfy himself of that? How does that square with the fact that he knew in 2017 that, at the very least, a van was used in this process? How could the Minister say that everything was in order when this was the case? When did he speak with Michael Stone about this? He told the media at a press conference on Sunday that he took a number of weeks to make sure that all of the detail was accurate and that they were out putting up posters on four nights. Unfortunately for the Minister, there are photographs showing them out in the middle of the working day, wearing hard hats and high-visibility clothing, right off the building site with the company van parked nearby. When did the Minister contact Michael Stone to find out how much he paid, how it was acquired and whether they were Designer Group employees? Were they paid in cash? The Minister was Minister for Finance.

See this speech in context