Paul Bradford (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It amounts to hundreds of thousands of euro per annum, €1 million plus between now and next general election; that is a great deal of money.

We can return to Senator Martin Conway's point when we come to deal with later amendments. He has stated his view that parties should be funded directly by the taxpayer or the State. It is an interesting argument, one that has been made previously and there are pluses and minuses.

In recent weeks commentators have felled many trees and printed many column inches on new political parties. Ironically, on the right hand side of today's edition of The Irish Timesthere is a story about the possibility of a new left-wing party being established. If that is the case, so be it. We will have to reflect on the question of funding of parties in that regard. To a large extent, the current law makes it difficult for new groupings to emerge. It is as if taxpayer's money is being used to corral the political system as the preserve of a number of parties, with all of them, not surprisingly, going happily along with that concept and stating there shall be no new beginnings. We will have to discuss that issue into the future.

I thank the Minister for his engagement. On the first day we debated the legislation his line of argument was that we should resign and how dare we leave a party, etc., which he has fine-tuned to talk about the staffing of parties. He elaborated on this to refer to formulae and calculations and now he has raised the issue of a fixed starting point. By making provision in the legislation for by-elections, we are accepting circumstances can change and, tragically, in the case of by-elections, they do change. When a by-election occurs, the financial calculations and allocations are changed. Where five, ten or 15 people are nominated and elected on behalf of parties and they are no longer members of these parties, it is politically and morally wrong and sends a strong and bad signal about politics to the public if we do not say the moneys should be returned to the taxpayer.