Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Before dealing with the amendment, I will speak to the broad principle behind what the Senator is suggesting. I take the view that everybody needs to be transparent in respect of their funding. Whether it is a lobbying group, a political party or any other body engaged in a political process or policy-making process, there should be utter transparency in respect of all its sources of income, domestic or international. That applies to everybody in the policy-making space, including political parties. The strength of the policy-making process in Ireland comes from freedom of expression for all. It works best when there is respect for the fact that every person or body corporate has the right to freedom of expression, as well as respect for civil liberties and access to democracy and policy making. All of the organisations should be clear about their funding sources in every context. This goes beyond lobbying and to the question of those entities engaged in lobbying processes that also provide services on behalf of the State. A number of organisations deliver services in a range of different contexts, whether disability matters or housing. They are partners with the State. They deliver services funded by the State and at the same time lobby the Government for changes in policy, as they are entitled to do. There should, however, always be a measure of clarity in their accounts as to the proportion of funds they spend that have come from State sources because people are entitled to know that the State is delivering services, albeit occasionally through partners, and a number of different organisations could come to mind in that context. There is a major question around transparency in political activity of various kinds. It is, however, broader than this Bill because, as I said, it has a service delivery piece and a political piece. In anticipation of this debate, I asked my officials in the Department of Finance to liaise with colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform to look at that in a more comprehensive way. I might come back to Senator McDowell on that.

Where I have a concern with this specific amendment is that, while I appreciate what the Senator says about 50% being from one source, I think that is drawn too narrowly from a technical perspective because that would be too easy to circumvent if one were trying to create a body and distribute the funds from a broader group of people. Particularly on some of the State side, there are so many different sources of funding that in order to be clear and to set that out in audited accounts, not just expenditure but also sources of funding, the funding may be directly from Departments, it may be from Pobal or it may be from a whole range of different entities. Similarly, on the private or commercial side or on the advocacy side, where there is no funding by the State, there is the proportion of funders domestically and internationally and the sources thereof. The 50% piece therefore does not help deliver the scale of transparency the Senator might like, but I am very much supportive of the principle of it.

More broadly, as regards Ireland's position, we have a very good lobbying register relative to our European counterparts. We are one of the seven member states that has this on a statutory basis. We are continually looking at trying to improve and clarify that. While I cannot accept the Senator's amendment directly, I am very interested in the subject more broadly and how we might come back to it in the context of transparency, not just on lobbying but also on political funding and the delivery of services in partnership with the State.