Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State. I concur with many of the points made by Senator Walsh as I have never been a great believer in limits as an appropriate means of controlling and regulating electoral expenditure. It is always possible to circumvent such limits and they always give rise to confusion. For these reasons, I do not believe it is possible to apply spending limits effectively.

Every donation or contribution to a candidate, however large or small or whether given by gift, grant or otherwise, should be recorded in the candidate's accounts of his or her election. Such accounts should show what moneys were received and from where and on what they were spent. In the previous general election the number of people listed as making donations declined significantly because people made donations below the threshold at which it was necessary to declare. Consequently, these contributions were not declared and we were worse off in terms of transparency than previously. Limits are, therefore, less important than transparency about sources of funding. If I stand for election and receive a grant from the INTO political fund and this is recorded, people will know from where I am coming and my views, background and priorities etc. This is more important than applying expenditure limits.

While I do not have a problem with expenditure limits, they do not appear to be enforceable, as became evident from the recent row between the Standards in Public Office Commission and Libertas. Given that they can be circumvented or ignored, it would be much better to spell out clearly in law that every penny received and spent must be accounted for. That is something I have done since 1982, long before any legislation was brought in, because there is nothing to hide. It is quite straightforward.

Another aspect of these limits that bothers me is that it almost appears that people can only support a party or a candidate through some sort of subterfuge. We should have a society where people would be delighted to make a contribution to support their particular party or candidate as their contribution to the exercise of public representation. We have turned all that around. Lists appear in the newspapers that are presented in such a way that if someone makes a donation to a political party or a candidate, it is as if there is dirt attaching to that or that some question must be asked about him or her. It is as if there is some reflection on the person who would do that. I do not like that.

Over the years I have seen stories of huge sums of money being spent by candidates who failed to get elected to local authorities, and that tells its own story. Money is not the be-all and end-all of it. It is not possible to work out the costs involved in texting, mailing and all the other variations of information technology which can be put into play at second, third or fourth hand from any place in the world, and that cannot be controlled.

This reflects another age. We can examine costs for various items. There is no reason somebody could not employ a person in Sydney to overwhelm every person they know in Castlebar with an e-mail or text for the local elections. One can get people working around the clock on the far side of the world and there is no way one can track that down or come back at it. Indeed, in terms of phone canvassing, with voiceover Internet facilities no one knows from where the phone calls are coming. They are freefone calls and therefore a person can phone from Auckland to Castlebar for less than a cent. This reflects another age and it does not deal with the issues before us today.

The reason for this legislation is because of the finger being pointed at graft and questionable activities among politicians and in local authorities. We would be far better trying to raise the public awareness of the good work of local authorities, increasing the level of trust and confidence in them, giving them real power, perhaps by giving them back rates, and undoing some of the damage we have done to them in the past 30 years.

I have never stood in a local authority election and never intend to. I do not depend on local authority votes for my election. I have a disinterested view on this but when I go to other countries, especially in continental Europe, it appears there is a cachet about being a member of the local authority or mayor of the local village and making a commitment to the local community that people appreciate. People pay their rates or local taxes or whatever they are called and that money is spent on better footpaths, some seafront attraction, fireworks on the national holiday or feast day or whatever it happens to be. That is how people make local connections.

We have not done enough to recognise the good work done at local authority level. Local authority members are treated and presented as being some sort of gombeen people who are on the local authority for what they can get out of it. Their commitment to the community, public representation and their local area goes unrecognised. That bothers me and we are paying the price for that.

Politics is at a low ebb in society currently. All politicians are low on the levels of trust and confidence. We are barely above bankers, and that is a recent development. We have a responsibility to address that and we should begin at local authority level. I would like to see the Minister of State's Department running an advertising campaign encouraging people to stand for local authority elections and indicating that we value that contribution and that there is no higher involvement in a democracy than public representation, whether that be at local, national or European level, or the President of the country. We must recognise that if somebody puts their name on the ballot paper they give their time to improve their local community, the living standards of local people and whatever else they can do. We have failed to sell that message.

Every time I hear somebody making a general attack on politics I defend the political system. If they attack a particular individual I will make a judgment call on that but if it is a generalised dismissal, contemptuous remark or cynical approach to politicians as a group or class, everybody has a duty in a democracy to question and challenge that, but it is not happening. It is so easy, whether it be in the media, the local pub, the sitting room or whatever, for people to write off many genuine people at local authority level. That has happened because, like all other aspects, we have become aware of various levels of graft, things that are wrong, bribes taking place, etc.

I live in Fingal, previously known as north Dublin, which is a cause of a lot of activity in Dublin Castle. I have lived in Fingal for 40 years and I would say that 98% of the decisions made by Fingal County Council or its predecessor in our area, Dublin County Council, have been good in terms of planning. We know everything that was done the wrong way in terms of graft and so on but there were many right things done as well. That should be recognised and appreciated. My local authority was the first in the country to introduce the European required standards of insulation for building projects which were disgracefully ignored by the Government and the Minister's Department from 1998 until the Green Party came into office and before the new building regulations were introduced. Various attempts were being made to create new measurement systems and new systems of heat losses as opposed to insulation and various other aspects. Fingal County Council is an example of a county council which took a lead on that which was then followed up by others like South Dublin County Council and a number of others throughout the country. I understand Clare was one of them and there were some others.

County councils and local authorities can give a lead in many ways, and they do. They have a feel for their local area and very often we do not trust them. A classic example was the major brouhaha about 20 years ago because we could not trust the Board of Works or some other body. We apparently decided that anything to do with local development of interpretative centres, etc. would be given to the local authorities. That was fine until local authorities took a number of decisions such as the Burren interpretative centre. Many people in south Dublin did not like the decision of Clare County Council and they whipped up a great deal of opposition to it but what happens is we take back centrally again that authority from the local authority because we do not trust it. That is one side of the argument. The other side is that some local authorities have been afraid to take decisions on issues such as waste or passing their budget annually.

Putting all those aspects together it is clear we have a job of work to do to replace trust and confidence in local authorities. They do good work. They should be complimented on it and recognised for it. Their work should be acknowledged and this legislation fails to do that. It is media driven. This did not come in the first place from politicians. It came from the media and I am always concerned about that. It is a populist approach to running in front of the media in the hope of getting it right. I have no particular problem with it but as I said at the outset, limits do not do what they set out to do. Transparency is about keeping a record of everything that is done in the campaign and every cost, and making those available for the world to see without putting limits in front of it. As well as this, given advances in information technology it will not be possible to police this legislation.