Senator Ronan Mullen Transparency and enforceability should be key to any review of Irish electoral law, Senator Ronan Mullen has said.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic against the background of calls from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission that the Electoral Act should be reviewed to prevent a “chilling effect” on the funding and activities of civil society organisations, Senator Mullen said there are cases to be made for requiring all donations to be declared.
“Transparency should always be required. Everything should be fully and properly accounted for,” he said, adding: “I would certainly see a merit in easing the restrictions here at home by donors based or resident in Ireland, providing it’s fully and transparently accounted for. I’d be more uneasy about lifting the restrictions on money from abroad for direct political activity.”
Inability
Any rules around this should be capable of being enforced, the NUI senator stressed.
“Until now, as we’ve seen with the Amnesty case, there was an inability to deal with the situation in the way it needed to be dealt with, so if there are rules they should be fully and properly enforceable,” he said.
The current system depends on the person declaring, and allows for the receipt of large numbers of undeclared donations just under the declarable limit, he noted.
“It probably would be a better thing if all donations had to be declared down to a very low threshold,” he said.