Sometimes you have to take your hat off to a rival publication – even one like The Ditch which has a very different editorial line on many of the issues facing Ireland than the one you’ll find on these pages. The High Court decision yesterday forcing the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) to release Leo Varadkar’s donation statements to that publication is a victory for freedom of information, transparency, and accountability in Irish democracy. The Ditch going to the expense of a High Court action – which is not cheap – is to their credit. The outcome, however, is very much to SIPO’s discredit.
It should be said, in all fairness, that there’s nothing particularly earth-shattering in Varadkar’s SIPO donation statements. Varadkar, like many other Irish politicians, made multiple statements in multiple years because it came to light – we don’t know how, exactly, but it may well have been on his own side – that his original statements omitted various donations. He is not the first, nor will he be the last, politician, to fall foul of Ireland’s needlessly complicated rules about what has to be declared and what does not.
That said, the statements themselves are not really the issue. SIPO’s defence for not releasing them, however, is bizarre:
SIPO refused the request.
It did so even though it was obliged to release the donation statements under electoral law. SIPO wrongly claimed it couldn’t release Varadkar’s donation statement until it had been reviewed by TDs and senators – until it had been “laid before both houses of the Oireachtas”.
The Ditch replied the following day warning SIPO that it was breaching electoral law and that the commission would be the subject of judicial review proceedings in the High Court.
SIPO responded in early September with further excuses for not releasing Varadkar’s donation statement.
“Statements received by the commission are reviewed to monitor adherence with all associated obligations. If inspection access was permitted at this juncture in the process, it would hamper the commission’s ability to properly complete its compliance function,” wrote a SIPO spokesperson.
The idea that the public cannot see a record of political donations submitted in accordance with law by a politician until such time as those records have been submitted to the Dáil is absurd on its face, and, as the commission eventually conceded by releasing them, has no basis in law. Nor is there any prima facie good reason why this should be the case: TDs are obligated to make these statements in order to demonstrate their compliance with the law, and for the purpose of giving the public an insight into who is funding their campaigns. The purpose of these statements is to enhance trust with the public by increasing the transparency around political funding. If the statements are hidden – even for a time – then that surely has the opposite impact to the basic intention of the law requiring such statements to be made in the first place.
Second, the commission makes the frankly ridiculous argument that releasing the statements might hinder SIPO’s ability, in effect, to figure out whether those statements were in fact correct. This is, in a sentence, classic civil service bluster: We couldn’t possibly investigate whether something is true if everybody else could investigate it at the same time. That makes no sense, and in fact makes the opposite of sense: If a false statement to SIPO has been made, then the chances of somebody coming forward to identify the falsehood is much greater if the public are aware of what has been said. If they are unaware, how can they help SIPO, or anyone else, with their enquiries?
As it happens, there’s hardly ever much of interest in these statements to the public anyway, because of how little actually has to be declared. The purpose of the statements is to force politicians to declare large donations into their dedicated campaign bank accounts – but this is not in practice how political donations really work. Most of the money is actually collected either by the national party in things like annual draws and raffles, or by the local party or the candidate by organising dinners where the ticket price just happens to be a euro or so below the threshold where the money would have to be declared.
Nor are the statements likely to reveal bribery or corruption, if such a thing was going on, since SIPO’s remit extends only to political donation accounts and not to personal bank accounts. That would be purely a matter for the tax man or the Gardai.
Nevertheless, if politicians are compelled by law to reveal this information, there is absolutely no good reason why it should not be public, and published. It is to the states’ shame that the Ditch had to go fighting for this information, and to the Ditch’s very great credit that they went and fought for it.