Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

This motion raises important fundamental points. Although there has been considerable crossfire in the Chamber this evening, there are historical matters which must be addressed too. I was in Weston Park in Britain in 2001 when the Irish Government was informed that senior members of the republican movement were in Colombia. They were selling military know-how to FARC, a Marxist guerilla group there, in exchange for approximately $20 million, which was funded from the narcotics trade by FARC. That was in 2001, three years after the Good Friday Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement finally bedded down in 2006 at the St. Andrews conference and got going thereafter.

During the period from 2002 to 2006, I was aware, as Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform of major criminality of a fundraising kind being orchestrated from Belfast by senior figures in the republican movement. Robberies were committed here in the city of Dublin, concentrating on proxy theft from Dublin Port. There was the Makro robbery in Northern Ireland, a celebrated case of a provo fundraising operation. As we know, there was the Northern Bank robbery too. Senior Sinn Féin people were involved in laundering the proceeds of that robbery. I cannot at this stage turn a blind eye to all that and say that that fundraising was something which we can just blithely ignore.

Senator Currie has mentioned the 60 premises in this jurisdiction owned by Sinn Féin. Where did this money come from? Who pays for these premises? There are many other issues, such as the non-application, in a secure way, of the Irish laws on political donations to the Sinn Féin Party, because it is organised as a single entity on both sides of the Border.

It is important that this House knows about the years from 2002 to 2006, when the Government of which I was a member was putting everything into ensuring that the Belfast Agreement succeeded and that the semtex was handed up, with the signs on Belfast roadsides reading "Not an ounce, not a bullet". During those years, we were insistent that the provo machine gave up criminality and stopped shooting people in their knees in back alleys in Belfast, and that it should undertake to accept the rule of law and the legitimacy of the Police Service of Northern Ireland unequivocally. We spent much time trying to achieve that. There was a struggle, with ambivalence and foot-dragging, and a desire to keep people like, I am sorry to say, the late Bobby Storey, immune from the public glare. He was identified as the organiser of much of the Provisional movement's criminal activities. I will not go into the fuel laundering and money laundering activities which took place along the Border.

I want this House to know that the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and I were conscious that we were not insisting as part of the overall implementation of the Good Friday Agreement that the increasingly severe money-raising restrictions on Irish political parties to which the last speaker referred, starting from 1997 onwards, would be immediately applicable to Sinn Féin. During those years, I, as Minister, went to North America and spoke to very rich American businessmen who were contributing large sums of money via Friends of Sinn Féin and other events to fund the Sinn Féin Party in this jurisdiction. I remember pointing out to them that they should look at the permanent representative of Sinn Féin in Havana and at the FARC connections of Sinn Féin, and ask themselves if it is really a political party which they should donate to. We made the calculation at that time that it was important for the Sinn Féin movement to be brought across the line and that there was a significant Sinn Féin activist element in North America, with the chief function of raising money for the republican movement, as they wrongly called it, on this island. Bertie Ahern and I took the view that the priority was to get the Good Friday Agreement up and running, and that an insistence on dismantling all the Sinn Féin money-raising activity in America would be counterproductive.

The time has come for everybody in this State to operate on a level playing field. We had examples of claims made in this House, and elsewhere, to the Irish public, that Sinn Féin Deputies donated everything above the average industrial wage to the party. If that was the case at the time, that was clearly unlawful, because that exceeded the amount permitted by law. I only want transparency and a level playing field for all participants in our democratic process.The thought process that led me and the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, not to insist on strict controls on foreign fundraising must now end. I will finish on this point. We must legislate to make sure that everybody, whether they organise themselves like the Green Party, North and South, or not, plays on the same level playing pitch, by the same rules and with the same standards of honesty and that the legacy of distorting the democratic process by moneys obtained in the manner I have described ends now and never recurs.