If you were to list the top five or six misconceptions that the wider public have about politicians and political parties in general, top of every list would probably be the idea that they’re swimming in money.
Political fundraising in Ireland is desperately hard. And it is harder yet if you are not already one of the big parties. Established political parties in Ireland are funded by the state directly from your taxes, on a formula based on the number of votes and seats won at the last election. For example, in 2020, the last year for which figures have been published, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Fein and Fine Gael all received about €1.3-1.4m from the state directly. At the lowest end of the scale, People before Profit got €289,000 from the state. To qualify for state funding, you must win 2% of the vote at a General Election – Aontú missed out on this at the last election, winning about 1.9%, so they get nothing.
The other thing about state funding is that you cannot spend it on campaigns. You cannot buy posters with it, or print leaflets. The money is essentially tied to administration – you can pay wages to party staff, pay rent on an office, that sort of thing. But if you want to print posters, you need to raise that money yourself, and that’s where it gets hard.
The absolute maximum any one person or corporation can donate to a political party in a year is €2,500. You may not accept donations from overseas. Donations over €1,500 must be disclosed, and the name and address of the donor will be published by SIPO in their annual returns.
Set these rules against the cost of running a general election campaign for one candidate: At minimum (based, in this case, on my own experience of having done it, in 2011) a general election campaign that wants to be serious will need to spend at least €20,000, and probably more than that. That will just about cover the costs of posters, leaflets, and various events. You can spend less, but you’ll probably lose. The best funded candidates usually spend much more.
All of which is to say: Before you run for election – if you have any ideas about maybe being in the shout for a seat – you need to know where, and from whom, that twenty grand is coming. In my own case, like a lot of candidates, it came substantially from my own pocket, with about a third of it raised in donations – the majority from three or four supporters. I suspect most candidates have a similar tale to tell.
All of which leads me, by way of precursor, to this question: Where on earth did the National Party get more than €400,000 in gold bars?
A senior member of the party, which has no elected TDs or senators, has claimed that “a considerable quantity in gold” has been removed “from the party’s safe vault in Dublin” and has gone missing.
RTÉ News understands the gold is valued at over €400,000.
That should make anyone, regardless of their views of the National Party, say well hang on now just a minute. Where did that come from?
We can rule out state funding, for a start: The National Party would be entitled to that like anyone else, if they got 2% in an election. But at the last general election, they managed only 4,773 votes nationwide, or 0.2% of the national vote. Aontú didn’t make the threshold either, but they got ten times as many votes. Even so, my understanding is that Aontú don’t have anything like that kind of money sitting around in their accounts.
Which brings us to the possibility of donations: Does it make sense that a party that got that few votes nationwide would be clobbering everybody else with donations? Even if you allow the notion that the National Party has a few very rich supporters (which I doubt) then donation limits would put the kibosh on that – those donors would be capped at €2,500, and their names would have to be disclosed. The National Party has notably not done so.
What about possibility three? That somebody left them a fantastical amount of money in a will?
Well, Sinn Fein had that kind of windfall, recently, when English Millionaire William Hampton left them €4m in a bequest. There’s a catch though:
SINN Féin has insisted that all funds donated to the party by the late English millionaire William Hampton will be spent north of the border.
Sinn Fein had to declare that bequest – and they’ve had to spend it supporting their candidates in the United Kingdom, where the rules are different. The National Party – the clue is in the name – does not run candidates in Northern Ireland.
The National Party has for some time clearly been well-funded – the annual Ard Fheis was held in the not-at-all-cheap Lough Erne resort last year, and the general election campaign it fought in 2020 may not have resulted in many votes, but that wasn’t for a shortage of posters or leaflets. The campaign for then-Deputy Leader, James Reynolds, in Longford Westmeath, for example, was one of the most visible of any in the country, by any party.
So whether they like it or not, the revelation that they have (or had) 400k sitting around in Gold poses significant questions, because there are few obvious legal sources of that kind of cash for a political party with their support levels. And given the number of enemies the party has (apparently now internal, as well as external), the self-styled An Ceannaire would probably want to start coming up with an explanation for where all the bullion came from.
It all looks very, very weird.