"Sunlight is the best disinfectant." So spoke Justice Louis Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court. Transparency is the means of achieving fair politics that people can have confidence in.

On the vexed issue of how politics is to be funded the people ought to know where the money is coming from. There should be limits on how much can be received from any one source. This is what the Government is proposing and I agree.

The Opposition, however, is demanding State funding. It wants to replace a golden circle with a closed shop. State funding of politics would damage the vibrancy of our democracy. It would spancel the people in the unfettered exercise of their democratic franchise.

In a recent Sunday Independent/IMS opinion poll, which tested the waters on this matter, 71 per cent of respondents expressed an opinion that political parties should not be financed through taxation. Well over two-thirds of the population, then, stand against State funding as a means of easing our disquiet over political funding.

As I have stated here before, politics in Ireland is an organic, ground-up affair. It is subject to sudden and fundamental changes, such as the surge in Clann na Poblachta support in the 1946 general election, or the Labour Party's gains in the early 1990s.

Perhaps the real motivation behind support for State funding lies here. A system of State funding, based on electoral strength at the previous general election, or a system which forbids corporate donations and which permits only exceedingly low levels of personal donations renders the establishment of new parties or new independent candidates impossible. Indeed, the very survival of small parties would be threatened.

The Labour Party was once incessantly harried from the left by such small parties. Since consuming Democratic Left, however, that problem has, in part, abated for it - despite present pressures from Sinn Fein in Dublin South West and elsewhere.

Today though, as the Labour Party increasingly clings to the centre, it would undoubtedly come under threat by a fresh, new, non-establishment party of the left. The Labour health policy, which would shut local hospitals, and its fiscal policy, which would needlessly raise taxes, have rendered it a sitting duck to such a new left-wing party.

Full State funding of our political parties, then, would be a deadening hand on our system - a garrotte on democracy. Within parties it would weaken democratic processes. Party leaders would no longer be dependent on parliamentary colleagues and members to raise funds. Not only would party leaders be financially independent of the members but the membership, in turn, would be hugely dependent upon the leadership for their budgets at local level.

I, for one, do not favour a State dolemaster's role for our party leaders. Democratic centralism is not my tradition.

For those with an interest in fact that is stranger than fiction, according to Protocol No 176 of the meeting of the Central Committee Politburo of the USSR, held on January 10th, 1990, a $50,000 donation was sanctioned by that body to the Workers' Party of Ireland. The KGB was charged with the transfer of the money to Ireland. That of course was state funding and accordingly politically correct.

International experience seems to dismiss the notion of State funding as a simple panacea for our justified disquiet. Almost 10 years ago the German constitutional court ruled that state funding for political parties should be reduced as parties there were becoming overly dependent upon public funds.

Similarly, international experience would also seem to assert that state funding does not stop sleaze. A 1994 British House of Commons report pointed out that France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan had experienced funding scandals despite state funding systems.

WHEN I was first elected to the Dail in the mid-1960s, the now complex problem of party political funding was of little concern to individual candidates in their constituencies. We ran our elections on fresh air, with a little help for posters and canvass cards from party headquarters.

There was a fund-raising organisation in Fianna Fail at the time called Taca but many party members were uncomfortable with its methodology and, happily, it disappeared.

The Americanisation of party political funding had not then reached this State. Time moved on, however, and new funding pressures arose. Golf classics, fund-raising dinners and other methods became the norm.

Meanwhile, the Fianna Fail National Collection in urban areas had become almost extinct although church gate collections in rural areas are still practised.

There is a real and genuine problem facing modern political parties as to how they should be properly funded.

Whatever methods are finally adopted, the key to political funding is transparency. Candidates, public representatives and political parties should have to maintain special accounts for political donations.

Annual certification must be required to confirm that all donations were lodged into that account and were used for legitimate purposes. It should be an offence not to channel political donations into these accounts. The Taoiseach has already backed these ideas.

In addition, the Fianna Fail rule that all candidates for public office should have to produce tax clearance certificates or, at the very least, a declaration that they are in the process of receiving such a certificate, should be extended to all candidates of all parties. Fianna Fail has at least learned the value of humility in its approach to money and politics.

There is a considerable degree of disquiet about political donations here as there is across Europe and beyond. Much of this disquiet is reasonable: there has been corruption, there has been deception. We now need a system which can keep politics open and trustworthy. State funding is plainly not that system.