Greg Daly
Fine Gael TD Kate O'Connell Renua election candidates have accused Fine Gael of acting on false pretences by continuing to claim special allowances for Lucinda Creighton and other former party members.
“Each political party gets a certain amount of money from the State in respect of each TD and senator to support the work of parliamentarians,” Ms Creighton’s husband Senator Paul Bradford told The Irish Catholic. Explaining that this money – €35,000 per TD and €23,000 per Senator – is used for research and training, the Cork East candidate said this allowance is valid in principle, but that “it’s completely unjustified to continue claiming it when members have left or are kicked out”.
The Government party is understood to have claimed more than €500,000 for former party members since the expulsion of seven Oireachtas members from the parliamentary party in 2013 after they voted against the legalisation of abortion.
Describing this as “profoundly unfair”, Mr Bradford said “money’s being taken from taxpayers on false pretences”, continuing, “the taxpayer is funding Fine Gael on the basis of members who are not in Fine Gael”.
Expulsion
After their expulsion from the parliamentary party, Ms Creighton and her colleagues called on Fine Gael to return to the taxpayer the special allowance the party was claiming for the expelled members, but Fine Gael refused to do so. While the claimed allowances cannot be directly spent on election campaigning, they free up other party funds for the general election.
It is a political reality that Fine Gael can legally claim allowances for expelled party members, Terence Flanagan TD agreed, questioning the morality of this. “Fine Gael is drawing down money for us even though we’re no longer part of Fine Gael,” he told The Irish Catholic, adding that attempts to reform this practice had fallen on deaf ears.
The irony of this, the Dublin Bay North TD added, is that Fine Gael is claiming allowances for representatives expelled from the parliamentary party for keeping faith with a claim during the 2011 election that Fine Gael was opposed to the legalisation of abortion.
“We honoured the commitment the party had made in the last general election,” he said.