Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also welcome the tribunal report because it highlights the wide ranging corruption that took place. Everything that happened was underhand and shameful. While the report has been referred to the Garda, past investigations point to the fact it is unlikely it will be acted on. I would like to be proved wrong but the judges' findings are based on the balance of probabilities, which is not enough to satisfy a court, where something has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. The editorial in The Sunday Business Post on 25 March 2012 asked, "why our justice and political systems did not act years ago on much of what has been uncovered, the details of which were abundantly clear from the evidence given at the tribunal".

Perhaps I did not understand the difference between a court and a tribunal regarding the balance of proof necessary because one of the fundamental questions is whether the tribunal was established to give certain people more time. In other words, was it a method of postponement of certain facts until a more appropriate time? Perhaps we will never get the answer to the question. How many more cases lie undiscovered? We must now act on the weak links between business and government and introduce transparency to lobbying and fund-raising. This can all be done online now. We must even extend this to all levels of society and, for example, outline public spending online. I am not sure why the government is doing more on lobbying and documenting spending in an easily accessible way for every citizen. There must be also a real threat of prosecution.

As regards political donations, we have to go much further than recent legislation and protect whistleblowers. I proposed that we give whistleblowers some reward and that has not been even considered. Given that some may be taking a massive risk to their career and family, why can we not provide an incentive for them to blow the whistle? What if some low ranking banker in the former Anglo Irish Bank highlighted the wrongdoings in the mid-2000s? Would we be in the crisis now? It is interesting to consider. We are still not doing enough to combat corruption and we are still behind the times on that. John Devitt of Transparency International Ireland said, "Other forms of abuse are possible because of the weak or non-existent regulation of lobbyists, the concentration of political power in the hands of government ministers and weak oversight by the Oireachtas...the planning and public contracting system still creates incentives for bribery."

In the US, businesses are obliged to reveal the policies they are seeking to influence and the clients on whose behalf they are working. We have to introduce something along those lines. What about former politicians working for lobbying companies? We have all witnessed former politicians walking around Leinster House who are clearly here to lobby. There is nothing wrong with that but it should be above board. Should the Oireachtas be more picky about who is allowed in? I believe we should have fines and deadlines for not signing up to a register of lobbyists or even for furnishing misleading statements. In the UK, it was recently proposed to introduce fines of up to Stg£5,000 for missing deadlines or higher fines and a maximum two year jail term for knowingly making misleading statements. That is a real method of countering unethical business–government relations.

The Mahon tribunal has highlighted many issues such as this. It has shown we do not have a system that works and we need to do something about that. I acknowledge legislation on lobbying and whistleblowing is proposed but we can take many other measures. Most of us did not realise the problems but it is obvious from the Mahon tribunal that the problems were abundantly clear and yet no action was taken. It is time to take action. Given that the tribunal is a public service it should have been undertaken much earlier and should have had more legal weight. It is welcome that we can speak on the subject openly because often those who speak on it are perceived to have a vested interest. We have got to clean that up and make it possible for us to act above board. It is in our hands to do that in the immediate future.