Ireland is failing to implement rules on political finance, despite having a very strong standard of regulation in place, an international watchdog has found.
A report by Washington-based non-profit body Global Integrity finds countries around the world are “equally failing” to effectively regulate the flow of money into politics.
The Global Integrity Report 2011 covers 31 countries, including developed nations such as the United States, Ireland and Germany, and dozens of emerging markets and developing nations such as Algeria, Ukraine and China.
Twenty-nine of them, including Ireland, rated less than 60 on a 100-point scale on questions assessing the effectiveness of laws regulating individual and corporate donations to political parties, as well as the auditing of those donations and campaign expenditures.
Ireland scored just 58 out of 100 on effectiveness of its party financing regulations and 55 out of 100 in its ability to effectively regulate contributions made to individual political candidates.
Global Integrity said the scores represented “a significant contrast with the country’s legal framework”, with some of the highest scores. Ireland rated 100 for party financing regulation and 80 for individual candidate regulation.
Disclosure of party and candidate political finance information to the public was among the lowest-scoring in the list of 31 countries (25 and 0 out of 100, respectively).
The report finds that government monitoring agencies tasked with enforcing political finance regulations “typically lack investigative power and often have little to no authority to impose sanctions”.
Similar issues were addressed in recommendations published in the Mahon tribunal report last month.
The tribunal made a number of recommendations for reforms, including the consolidation of existing political finance legislation.
It was concerned that the two Acts governing political finance “suffer from several deficiencies which adversely affect their ability to adequately control money in politics and the corruption risks which it poses”.
Mahon recommended strengthening the powers of the Standards in Public Office Commission to enforce political finance measures.It also recommended that parties and elected representatives be obliged to disclose their annual audited accounts.
The Mahon tribunal report described corruption, and in particular political corruption, as a “deeply corrosive and destructive force”. It noted money played a key role in politics and made a “vital contribution to a healthy democracy”.
“However, if insufficiently regulated it can also have a corrupting influence and lead to distortions in the democratic process,” the Mahon tribunal said.
Global Integrity’s executive director, Nathaniel Heller, said the body remained “deeply concerned by the lack of progress globally on effectively regulating the flow of large sums of private money into the elections process in many countries”.
“Political financing remains the number one corruption risk around the world, and absent meaningful reforms will continue to hinder many other open government and transparency initiatives,” he said.
The organisation said the Global Integrity Report: 2011 seeks to assess "the medicine applied against corruption rather than the actual disease of corruption at the national level".
It also examines other areas of government transparency and accountability, including conflicts-of-interest regulations, freedom of the press, and law enforcement accountability.
In 29 of the 31 countries assessed, government bureaucracy is considered an extension of the ruling party or is “routinely utilised for partisan purposes”, the report finds.
It also says the boundaries between public resources and party activities “remain blurry” in most countries assessed, with the exceptions of the United States (100 score) and Ireland (75 score).
Global Integrity is supported by charitable foundations, governments, multilateral institutions, and the private sector.
Minister for Justice Alan Shatter is to publish the heads of a new anti-corruption Bill this year.
"This will build on the work already done in the Criminal Justice Act 2011 and make it even clearer that there is no tolerance for white collar crime of any sort in Ireland," he said last week.
Mr Shatter said the Bill would provide for the disclosure of expenditure and donations at referendum campaigns, and will provide for the extension of the spending limit period that applies at Presidential, Dáil, European Parliament and local elections.