Light shed on dark world of overseas funding

It may now be time for the Gardaí to act on the murky world of foreign funding of political campaigns in Ireland, writes Greg Daly

“As you will appreciate, ‘garnering support for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution’ clearly falls within the definition of political purpose,” the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) told the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC) in November last year.

Pointing out that the ARC had sought and received a donation – of $25,000 – from a foreign body for political purposes, SIPO said it believed this to be contrary to Irish electoral law, and advised ARC that if it did not return the money to the US-based Open Society Foundation (OSF), the matter would have to be passed on to the Gardaí.

The ARC, as The Irish Catholic revealed in March, was not the only Irish body to come under SIPO’s scrutiny last year over money received from the George Soros-bankrolled OSF. Both Amnesty International Ireland and the Irish Family Planning Agency (IFPA) likewise faced questions from the State’s ethics watchdog over funding from the Hungarian-American billionaire’s grant-making network.

An OSF strategy document, leaked last year, had detailed plans to fund the three Irish organisations to work collectively on a campaign to repeal Ireland’s constitutional protections for unborn children.

Although ARC refrained from disclosing the value of its grant, Amnesty announced that it had received OSF funding amounting to €137,000 over two years and the IFPA admitted it had received a support grant of $150,000 (then €132,500), so it was natural that SIPO would investigate whether the money had indeed been supplied with a political purpose.

Legal
 realities

The commission wrote to the three organisations, broadly mapping out the legal realities, stressing that a failure to cooperate with SIPO enquiries is an offence, and asking for particular documents.

Initially declining to supply any documentation at all, ARC claimed SIPO’s approach was against human rights, but said its grant was received in January 2016, and was used for – it claimed – “non-political activities”.  ARC’s ongoing failure to supply documentation eventually led SIPO to threaten Garda involvement; ARC gave in and provided both its funding application and its grant agreement letter.

The application letter contained the key admission, responding to the question “What are you applying for?” as follows: “Purpose of project – To engage, mobilise and provide self-education opportunities on issues of sexual health, reproductive rights and abortion in Ireland with a strategic goal of garnering support for repeal of the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, reducing abortion stigma, and increasing grass roots engagement.”

That ARC was in breach of electoral law could hardly seem clearer, such that SIPO had no choice but to urge ARC to return the apparently illegally-acquired funds.

Amnesty International Ireland supplied SIPO with its grant agreement letter and a summary of project activities agreed with OSF, but apparently withheld the required application letter, although this had been explicitly requested. Despite this failure to cooperate with SIPO’s request, the commission did not last year push Amnesty on this.

This is all the more surprising given how ARC’s application letter had proven the ‘smoking gun’ showing that ARC’s application had been political all along. The significance of the letter can hardly be downplayed, not least given how, as Amnesty’s chief executive Colm O’Gorman said on Twitter earlier this month: “That contains detail of our campaign strategy and is therefore appropriately confidential.”

Amnesty has claimed that SIPO informed them last year that Amnesty was not in breach of the electoral act, and was not required to register as a ‘third party’, this position having of late been reversed by SIPO “without any material change to the facts”. Speculating that SIPO was being manipulated, Amnesty has described Irish electoral law as ‘draconian’ and said it was being inappropriately applied by SIPO.

This seems untrue in at least three ways.

In the first place, in October 2016 SIPO merely seems to have told Amnesty that on the basis of the (apparently incomplete) documentation provided, it accepted Amnesty’s position that it was not required to register as a third party at that point.

Secondly, according to SIPO’s statement last week, the recipients of OSF money told the commission in 2016 the donations had not been for political purposes, but SIPO this year received new information that suggested this was not so. It contacted OSF directly, and was told that the funding was for “explicitly political purposes”. With the donor’s intention being paramount in these things, it said, the donations were clearly illegal.

Finally, the commission said that in directing the recipients to return the donations, it was acting wholly in line with both the provisions of and the intentions behind Irish electoral law, and rejected the suggestion that it had changed its approach.

All of this throws interesting light on IFPA, which has so far maintained a discreet silence in the face of reports – seemingly backed by the SIPO statement – that it too must return its Soros money.

Like Amnesty, it appears to have refrained from supplying SIPO with its application letter, though its superficially bland December 2015 grant agreement letter invites interesting questions.

If the Amnesty grant was sought at the same time as the IFPA one, was it applied for – indeed, was it received – while Amnesty was indisputably a third party? Amnesty, after all, only deregistered as a third party in January 2016, a month after the IFPA grant was received and the same month as the ARC grant was received.

Does the IFPA grant number, OR2015-24083, sequential as it is to the OR2015-24082 ARC grant, support the notion that the three Irish grants were issued in a coordinated way? And how does the notion that the grants were issued “solely for religious, charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes” in accord with US tax law, square with SIPO’s claim that OSF had revealed them to have been in fact issued “for explicitly political purposes”?

And was it ever plausible that an organisation that in 2012 boasted of receiving the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Member Association Award for “its courageous campaigning for the right to abortion in Ireland” was not involved in campaigning related to the Eighth Amendment, as it told SIPO?

It doesn’t take much effort, after all, to google the IFPA submissions to the Oireachtas Committee and the Citizens’ Assembly, public meetings, or statements at Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment press conferences – even one just three weeks after telling SIPO that IFPA wasn’t involved in campaigning!

One final obvious question is whether it is enough to direct these bodies simply to return the illegal donations: even leaving aside public refusals to comply with SIPO’s decision, it seems large foreign donations were illegally sought and received, and that SIPO was misled and not fully cooperated with. One might think it’s time for the Gardaí to step in, regardless of whether the money is returned or not.

But perhaps the damage has been done. After all, 14 of the Oireachtas’s Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution 21 members last week recommended the repeal of Ireland’s constitutional protections for the unborn.

Over the last year at least 11 of those 14, along with the committee chair, were lobbied by Amnesty, the IFPA or both