I have spent a good part of my life in the Houses of the Oireachtas. Indeed, my long apprenticeship for any of the more attractive posts in the political system resulted in that phrase meaning something more geographical than that I occupied a seat in the Dáil. I spent a lot of time in or around this building. Although I would not see the time I spent here before 1992 as a feature to be highlighted in recommending a political career to young people of ability and ambition, it gave me a valuable opportunity to discover that all wisdom was not in my party and that much could be gained from listening to ideas of others.
Political life means that, from time to time, I and several of my fellow parliamentarians are on different sides in matters of controversy. That is a fact of life. However, there are some matters where I believe a bipartisan approach should be adopted and one of these concerns the conditions under which and in which Senators and Deputies work in the interest of enhancing democracy and its institutions. For this reason, when it was decided to introduce a fundamental change, namely, the auditing of leaders' allowances, I sought the views and guidance of the individual parliamentary party leaders who had operated the system for some years and who alone had the detailed knowledge of how those allowances were spent and what items of expenditure were required to keep the operations of their parliamentary followers up to speed.
What this Bill proposes in relation to the audit is a distillation of these consultations. I deviated in no significant way on any item which they men tioned to me. Some Members may have noticed that in the other House there was some criticism of the arrangements which the Bill contains in relation to the proposed audit and to the levels of allowances. Like all Deputies, my political survival depends on retaining the support of a certain proportion of the electorate in a multi-member constituency. Members are hyper-aware that there is no such thing as a safe seat and we may as a group be particularly sensitive to any perceived or imagined advantage that the system might give to one of our rivals over us. Some party Deputies implied that Independent Members, who receive the average amount paid in respect of all members of parliamentary parties, had in effect a war chest for the next election.
This House has a long tradition of active Independent Members whose contribution to its operation has been, to say the least, significant. Down the years, there has been the fullest acceptance of the right of non-party Members to have the same benefits as those who represent political parties. That is as it should be and, I suspect, may be due to the absence of geographical constituencies for Seanad Members. I would be surprised if any denunciation was heard here today of an arrangement which gave non-party Members of this House the same allowance as Senators generally.
Senators have been, since the foundation of the State, a valuable resource, particularly in terms of unusual expertise for the parliamentary parties to which they belong and for the nation. For most decades during which leaders' allowances were paid, the Seanad did not formally come into the picture. When my predecessor changed the method by which the leaders' allowance was paid by calculating it on the basis of representative strength, only Members of the Dáil were taken into account.
What I propose in this Bill is a clear recognition that Members of this House are an acknowledged element of the parliamentary party membership whose needs fall to be met from that allowance and, as in the Dáil in recent years, the Independents will have funds available to them to sustain their parliamentary activity. It is probably unnecessary to emphasise this – I must because it has been at times lost sight of – but these allowances in the House cannot be expended on electoral activities.
The Bill deals with three aspects of the payments made to leaders of parliamentary parties, how they are computed, how they are audited and how they are adjusted following a merger of parliamentary parties. I propose to deal with each of them but not in the order in which they occur in the Bill. These allowances have been with us in one shape or other since 1938, subject to two major qualifications in the interim. The allowance was specified as being for parliamentary purposes, including research, and, following the McKenna judgment, prohibited for use for electoral purposes. These remain the parameters for the use of the allowance and when this legislation was first mooted the representatives of all parties I consulted initially felt it should be left as it was.
Effectively, what they told me was that we all know what parliamentary purposes mean and, if there had been any confusion about it years ago, it has long since been clarified through public discussion. Equally, breaching the ban on electoral use of the allowances carries such a practical risk of a result being challenged by a disappointed candidate that only a party leader with pronounced kamikaze tendencies would even contemplate it.
These, I accept, are not unreasonable ways of looking at things. However, it is equally valid to say that the propriety of this particular public expenditure is currently self-policed and that it is appropriate that normal audit procedures should be put in place to correct this. The Bill provides that each leader will be required to prepare a statement of his or her expenditure, have it audited by a public auditor, not an employee of any State institution, and submit it with that auditor's report to the Public Offices Commission.
Section 1(11) of the Bill sets out where the responsibility to carry out these obligations rests when a leader dies or resigns before he or she has complied with them. Its sanction for non-compliance is simple, fail to deliver and the cash-flow dries up until you do. The documentation comes to the commission for its consideration. It may seek from a leader some clarification and then report to the Minister for Finance, telling him or her whether the leader's statement and auditor's report came within the time specified, are adequate or inappropriate, or disclose expenditure which does not comply with the requirements of the relevant subsection. The commission's report is laid before the Oireachtas and the commission must retain in its office for three years the leader's statement and auditor's report, freely accessible to the public. These arrangements are broadly in line with the arrangements applying to party funds provided under the Electoral Act.
A further criticism was that "parliamentary activities" could mean everything or nothing. I want a system which will stand the test of time, and none who joined this house in 1977, or others who came earlier, would have won a prize for predicting the items of expenditure which would feature regularly in a parliamentary party's statement of expenditure. What I have done, after serious consultations with all party leaders, is set out a list of what we regard as proper categories on which a leader's allowance could be spent. However, the subsection which lists these items states that parliamentary activity includes them. This clearly signals that the list is intended to be a snapshot of what the party leaders collectively have seen in recent years, and now see, as activities and items that have to be financed from that allowance. All in this House appreciate that equally legitimate categories which we have not thought of may arise in the future, and they can be added to the list eventually if they come to be a regular feature.
The second new element in this Bill is to take account of mergers between parliamentary parties when fixing allowances. Where it was relevant since 1938, no account was taken in fixing leaders' allowances of accretions his or her party acquired in this House during the life of a Dáil by defection from another party or the conversion of an Independent. This seemed reasonable – the electorate had provided votes which elected a member on the basis of the badge he wore at a general election or by-election and they were entitled to expect their party to enjoy that Deputy's support in the voting lobbies and financially. Deputy Quinn, when radically altering the basis of payment in 1996, held firmly to this position. The money stayed where the Deputy started and did not go where he or she moved, whether it was to another party or to non-party status. Most thought that reasonable.
Mergers or takeovers of smaller parties have not been unknown since the Oireachtas was established. In the 1920s and 1930s, what is now Fine Gael merged with several parties and the Labour Party did likewise in the 1940s and later. None of these exercises had implications for the leaders' allowance either because it did not exist or because the legal provisions then in place did not affect it.
The merger during the life of this Dáil of Labour and Democratic Left was different. Both had leaders who were paid on the basis of the Dáil strength of their parties. When the merger took place, Democratic Left's leadership ceased and Labour's was unaffected. This was because Deputy Quinn's Act of 1996 provided that the leaders' allowance was based on the number of Deputies elected as "members of that party at the previous general election or at a subsequent by-election". The Deputies involved felt hard done by. This was not a political smash and grab where a party captured a discontented member of a rival party or led a lonely Independent astray, this was a different matter entirely where two parties with a long-standing ideological affinity decided that they were, after all, compatible and both parliamentary parties and their members at large decided democratically that they would together become the Labour Party. I accept the Labour Party approach and agree that the same facility should be available to any party where all the Dáil and Seanad Members agree to merge in the future. I propose, however, to retain otherwise the arrangements where a defection would not cost funds to the parliamentary party to which the Member had belonged at election time, and would not travel to another party or direct to him or her in the case of opting for non-party status.
The rates of allowances which the Government believes should be paid to parliamentary parties of varying strength are set out in the first part of the Bill. In this we are following, with some adjustment, the approach taken by my predecessor, Deputy Quinn, when he decided to rad icalise the leaders' allowance system by removing the requirement that a party had to have seven Deputies elected before it received a share of the cash allocated to parliamentary parties and by extending the allowances to the Independents. As already stated, the adjustments we are making take account for the first time that Senators are members of various parliamentary parties and make demands, as Deputies do, on the services and facilities which a parliamentary party has to provide to all its members. These demands have been greater in recent years as the Seanad made greater use of specialised committees and as Senators took part with their colleagues from this House in the proceedings of joint committees, some of which have proved to impose heavy and contentious burdens.
The sums the Bill will provide on their account are, like those for Dáil Members, tapered but only involve two rates for parties and one for Independents because the Seanad is smaller. Those sums are lower than is generally the case for Deputies because, while the obligations on Members of both Houses are similar, the difference in rates is a recognition of the wider functions conferred on Deputies.
The second change we wish to make is in the tapering system as it applies to the Dáil. The existing four categories are being reduced to three. In 1996 Deputy Quinn took the view, not unreasonably, that the rates should be skewed in favour of the smaller parties on the grounds that a party with five or fewer Members had to keep the party flag flying on several issues with consequently a higher necessary spend per Member than a larger party or a non-party Member. I would not want to send that view down in flames, but there has been a belief in the House, at least from early in the life of the current Dáil, that larger parties had fared less than fairly under the scheme and the same would be true in the future for parties with between five and ten Dáil Members. What the new dispensation would involve is treating the first ten Dáil Members in the same way as the first five are treated at present and the next 20 in the way the next five – namely, Nos. 6 to 10 – were treated under the existing scheme. The remainder, including parties with more than 60 members, will receive the rate currently paid to Members Nos. 11 to 60. I commend the Bill to the House.
