SENIOR OFFICIALS from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have met in Dublin with a team from the Council of Europe who are evaluating Irish legislation, practices and procedures on the funding of political parties.
Fianna Fáil general secretary Seán Dorgan and his Fine Gael counterpart Tom Curran met separately with the evaluation team for approximately 45 minutes at the Department of Justice.
It is understood that both meetings discussed Ireland’s system of electoral and political financing “in a general way”. The evaluators were said to be “very happy” with what proved to be a “very open discussion” in both cases.
The meetings took place last Friday and the evaluators met the Green Party the previous day, but a department spokesman said a scheduled meeting with Labour had to be cancelled, as the party’s representative was ill.
Some parties did not accept the offer of a meeting until it was too late. Last-minute efforts to arrange meetings with Sinn Féin and Libertas (which says it has no record of the initial invitation) proved unsuccessful because of time constraints on the evaluation team which concluded its three-day visit on Friday. However, Fine Gael succeeded in arranging a meeting on the last day of the visit and Sinn Féin sent a written submission.
Invitations to meet the three-member team from the Council of Europe Groups of States Against Corruption (Greco) had been sent by post on their behalf by the Department of Justice to six parties on May 22nd.
However, the only parties to accept the invitations at that stage were Fianna Fáil, Labour and Greens. Fine Gael initially stated that it had not received the letter but would be “delighted” to meet the group.
The Fine Gael invitation was finally located on Thursday morning and a meeting arranged. A party spokesman said: “With the elections, where Fine Gael ran 780 local, seven European and two byelection candidates, it got mislaid.”
An e-mail query on the make-up and purpose of the inquiry team was sent by Sinn Féin and received a response from the department on May 27th but the party made no further contact at that time.
A Sinn Féin spokeswoman said: “Their request to meet with Sinn Féin was received but a subsequent communication to the party’s head office was mislaid during the recent election campaign.”
A Libertas spokesman said: “We would certainly have gone to meet them but we don’t have a record of receiving the invitation.”
Libertas made contact with the department on Thursday afternoon with a view to arranging a meeting but it was not possible at that late stage.
The Greco team's programme also included meetings with the Standards in Public Office Commission; the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission; Clerk of the Dáil Kieran Coughlan; officials from the departments of Justice and the Environment; and Irish Timescolumnist and former United Nations consultant on corruption Elaine Byrne.
This is the first time Greco has carried out an assessment of political funding in this State. Ireland is a member of Greco, which was established in 1999 to monitor compliance with anti-corruption standards. Membership of Greco is not confined to the Council of Europe and the US is among the 46 member states.
The Greco evaluators are Elena Masnevaite from the faculty of law at Vilnius University in Lithuania; Fernando Jimenez Sanchez, department of political science, University of Murcia, Spain; and Laura Sanz-Levia from the Greco secretariat.
A separate team visited Ireland earlier in the week to assess the level of criminal sanctions applied for corruption offences. The group met representatives from the Attorney General’s office, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement.
Both teams will initially submit their reports to the Government, seeking its opinion. The final documents will be published by Greco before the end of the year.