If the past is anything to go by, then at the next Irish General Election each of the three largest parties in the state can be expected to spend somewhere between one and three million euros on their campaigns. If yesterday’s report of SIPO, regarding political donations received by those parties, is anything to go by, then none of them will be able to afford it.
The report yesterday outlined the donations that the parties have to declare by law. Sinn Fein declared the most, at over €80,000. General Elections take place every five years – to even fund a half decent general election campaign, SF would have to be saving every declared donation for a decade.
Fine Gael declared about €56,000. Fianna Fáil – poor impoverished Fianna Fáil – a mere €2,500.
Of course, the parties are raking in far more than that. It is simply that the law does not require them to disclose it.
For example, parties are not required by law to disclose either their membership numbers or how much money they take in annually in membership fees. There is no power for SIPO or any other body to inspect the membership lists and ensure that the number of members correlates to the amount taken in annually in subscriptions.
Similarly, all three parties run fundraising dinners and national draws, where tickets are sold and huge profits raked in, but they are not required to disclose the number of tickets sold or the profits made. In addition, donations under the declarable limit need not be reported at all. The vast majority of the funding of Irish political parties (or at least that portion of it that can be spent on campaigns), in fact, is entirely opaque.
All three parties are also in receipt of substantial taxpayer funding, though Irish law prohibits them from spending any of this money on election campaigns: Nevertheless, this state funding still provides a huge advantage, as it covers staff and buildings and research and policy committees, all of which need not be funded from the party’s electioneering warchest. Finally, in the case of Sinn Fein, the party is a substantial owner of property as a body corporate, meaning that it has the ability to raise extra funds through rents or the sale of property, should that ever be needed.
All of this makes sense when you consider that Irish political funding laws were largely designed by the bigger parties, and work to their advantage: Relatively low limits on individual donations mean that it is impossible in Ireland for a wealthy individual to legally fund a party that might challenge the established political groups. Relying on mass membership for most of your funding means that a newcomer would need to quickly reach tens of thousands of paying members in order to compete.
Add it all up, and the net effect is that in order to legally spend the kind of money – on a national level – that you need in order to compete with the big parties, and you would need to either break the law, or be lucky enough to recruit at least 40 candidates who are willing to spend tens of thousands of their own cash on campaigns. This is not an accident – it’s a hurdle that the big parties are well aware that they’ve set up.
The SIPO declarations, then, are worse than useless: They are probably a form of active misinformation, because they leave the public with a grossly under-stated impression of exactly how much the big parties are taking in.
Reform of this area – which is not on the agenda, or likely to be – is nevertheless necessary. In our neighbouring democracy, for example, there are no limits on private donations to political parties, but those donations must be declared. This satisfies the need for transparency, but also gives new and smaller parties a fair crack of the whip when it comes to running effective campaigns and organising themselves into a coherent fighting force.
In addition, the funding disclosure laws need to be made more stringent: Parties should be required to disclose member numbers, revenues from membership fees, and accounts for all fundraising activities. This would address the existing temptation that some parties may feel to pretend that they have sold more tickets for dinners, or received more in membership fees, than they actually have.
For the moment, Ireland’s political funding laws accomplish almost nothing useful for members of the public actually interested in how their representatives fund campaigns. They accomplish much, however, for the parties who run those campaigns. None of this is, as they say, a coincidence.