Brian Hayes (Fine Gael)

Yesterday the Public Offices Commission published the spending of all candidates in last year's general election. Two issues arise from that which we should debate in the House. One is the timeframe in which election spending is monitored. This is quite absurd because huge sums of money can be spent by candidates in advance of that monitoring period. We need to debate this issue because it could lead to a serious distortion of the election result.

The other issue concerns the reason most Ministers and Ministers of State exceeded the expenditure limit, namely, the value that was put on the support they were given by their ministerial offices. For a three week period, significant sums of money were added to the election spend of some of the Leader's colleagues. There is an important constitutional issue in this. If such money is available to Ministers and Ministers of State during three weeks of a campaign, imagine the value over 12 months or a four year parliamentary term. We need to address this issue because the same level of support is not in place for Government backbench and Opposition Members.

There must be a genuine debate on whether it is right that Ministers can use vast sums of public money for their own constituency purposes. We already know the value for three weeks. If that is multiplied to take account of longer periods, it is clear that millions of euro are spent every year promoting Ministers and Ministers of State in their constituencies at the expense of Members in other political parties and those in their own. We need to debate this issue because it has serious constitutional implications. Perhaps the Leader would make time available to debate it.

I welcome the comment yesterday by Fianna Fáil MEP, Niall Andrews, a distinguished Dublin Member of the European Parliament for the past 20 years or so, when he described neutrality as a sham. I fully agree with him on that, as does my party.

Will the Leader allow time for a debate on our motion, No. 32, in the name of Senator Bradford and my Fine Gael colleagues? I suspect this motion does not have the support of a majority of the House, but I, among others, have been calling for a debate on neutrality for a long time. Now we know the position of our party and I encourage other parties to put their views on the record. An open-ended debate in which we can discuss our motion and the views of our colleagues in other parties would be very useful from the point of view of airing nationally our views on neutrality, given that there are many views on this issue among all the parties.