Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)

The accounting units already have to make donation statements available to the Standards in Public Office Commission and to their parent political party's head office in order to have a comprehensive picture of the donations that came in during election time. I do not propose to have the accounts of each branch of each political party made available. That would be to engage with a lot of information that would be extraneous as we would be looking at small amounts of money that the local units of the organisation use to run their affairs. It could make the situation overly bureaucratic. What we are attempting to do here is ensure that with regard to the processing of donations, there is clarity about the structures in place within a party. Such information would be publicly available so that the accounting units of the organisation will have to be very open about the fact that they exist.