Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As the Deputy knows, the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, will make a statement before the House this afternoon and he will take questions on it. That will be an opportunity for the Deputy to put some of those questions directly to him, should she so wish. Once that process is over, once he has made his statement and once he has answered questions, it will be a matter for people to decide whether they believe Paschal Donohoe. I heard his explanations over the weekend. I spoke to him about it, and I believe him. I have fought four general elections and I know what can happen in a campaign, particularly in a chaotic campaign. There might be 1,000 posters and somebody might offer to put up 100 or 150 for you. They may offer to drop a few thousand leaflets for you. You do this on the assumption they are going to do it voluntarily. It is possible that they may pay a third or fourth party to do that for them and not inform you. That appears to me to be what happened in this case.

We have strict laws when it comes to election spending in Ireland, and we have them for a very good reason. We do not want it to be the case that people have to have hundreds of thousands of euro or millions of euro just to stand in an election. That is why we have spending limits that cannot be breached, and that were not breached, even inadvertently, by the Minister with respect to 2016 and 2020. We do not want to have the kind of politics they have in the United Kingdom, the United States, or indeed on other parts of this island, where politicians and political parties accept multimillion euro donations, which is something Deputy McDonald’s party has done, with questionable legality, quite frankly.

Paschal Donohoe has not breached the spending limits, as I have said. However, he or his agent did fail to account for some of the spending in 2016 and 2020, in the region of €1,000 to €2,000 on each occasion. Why did that happen? It was because he did not know. Once he found out the full facts, only after last Wednesday, was he in a position to file revised returns. I understand he has filed a revised return for 2016 and is in the process of filing a revised return for 2020. Once he found out the facts, he acted to amend his declaration. This is something that is allowed under the law. Deputy McDonald knows it is allowed under the law because her whole party had to file its election declarations on three occasions after the 2020 election because it neglected to include in its accounts a €7,000 payment to a British polling firm. Sinn Féin tried to claim it did that after it noticed the error itself. It was exposed on that, and it turns out it only found out about that after The Irish Timescontacted the party. Therefore, Sinn Féin filed its returns in 2020 three times because of errors that had been identified by the media. The sums involved were much greater than any sums involved in relation to the Minister, Deputy Donohoe. Therefore, the Deputy seems to be trying to apply a very different standard to him than she would apply to her own party.

Indeed, the Deputy needs to consider revising her own declarations. Her declarations show she received a personal donation of €1,000 from her friend, gangland criminal and Navan Road torturer, Jonathan Dowdall. Members of the Deputy’s party, who are around her, have claimed that was a donation to her party. That requires Deputy McDonald to decide which it was and to make an amendment to her own declarations, just as the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, has done.

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