The Government has refused to grant the State's ethics body extra powers to order investigations into allegations of corruption or wrongdoing against politicians and office-holders, it has emerged.
The Standards in Public Office Commission wants power to order preliminary investigations - which would gather all available facts - in cases where a formal complaint has not been made.
Currently, the body, headed by High Court judge, Mathew P Smith, examines charges only after a complaint has been lodged. It decides if evidence exists to warrant a full inquiry.
However, the existence of a commission investigation is enough to spell the death-knell for a politician's career, regardless of the final outcome of its inquiry - as happened to former minister of State Ned O'Keeffe.
Two years ago, the commission sought powers to appoint an inquiry officer to procure evidence and conduct interviews before filing a report to the full board of the commission.
Ruling against the request, Minister for Finance Brian Cowen said he believed the commission's powers, "as they stand, are ample to meet public concerns in the field of public life".
Disappointed, the standards commission said: "Contrary to any view which might be held that it might wish to embark on 'fishing expeditions', the standards commission does not envisage having to avail of such a facility in any but the most exceptional of circumstances".
Privately, the commission is understood to believe the existing rules make TDs less likely to complain about their colleagues, while some issues of public importance never get investigated because no one makes a complaint. In other cases, commissioners are understood to believe politicians have paid too high a price for misdemeanours after full-scale investigations.
Meanwhile, a new body set up to vet local authority officials' ethics should be dominated not by civil servants, but by outsiders, the commission has told the Government. The Department of the Environment currently proposes that council officials should be required to get clearance from the Civil Service Outside Appointments Board before taking up a private job for 12 months after leaving the pay of the State.
However, the commission complained that Environment's proposed code of conduct for council officials does nothing to protect officials who refuse to act in an improper manner, and lacks a bar on council officials holding any other job while working for the State. The Department of the Environment proposes an official's private work should be "referred to a supervisor for a judgment on its propriety" if there was belief such actions "could reasonably be regarded as weakening public confidence".
The commission has also said that the Oireachtas committee chairman should come under the powers of the Ethics in Public Office Act, while TDs and Senators should be required to lodge tax-clearance documents on the first day a new Dáil meets, rather than months later.
The commission has warned that the public's right of association and expression in some cases is being affected because they sometimes fall under ethics legislation even though "their primary purpose may not be political".
The commission said legislation to protect whistleblowers should be brought in quickly, as recommended by the international corruption watchdog, Transparency International, which held that such laws were "vital to combat an engrained cultural acceptance of corruption in Ireland".
