THE Government is expected to press ahead with plans for the public funding of political electioneering in spite of concerns surrounding the constitutionality of the legislation.
Government sources said revised amendments to the Electoral Bill were to be brought to Cabinet "shortly" by the Minister for the Environment.
His "fine tuning" of the Bill must take into account the constitutional implications of the Supreme Court judgment in the McKenna case on state funding of the divorce referendum campaign. The legislation has been delayed at the Committee Stage in the Dail because of the case and the Attorney General Mr Dermot Gleeson, has advised that The Bill should be changed.
A Government spokesman said the "principle" of state funding still had "general support among the parties" and it was inaccurate to suggest that the Bill had been dropped.
But the Progressive Democrats spokeswoman on the environment, Ms Mairin Quill, said the blithe assertion that state control of electoral expenditure would make politics more honest needed to be challenged.
She said any attempt to pay up to £1 million every year to a single political party is manifestly calculated to assist that party to win the next general election by reference to its performance at the last general election".
Any retrospective attempt, to get around the clear constitutional prohibition on defraying parties' costs on general elections by disguising a subsidy as a reimbursement" of the cost of the last election was wrong in principle and unlawful under the Constitution, she said. It would be resisted tooth and nail in the Dail and in the courts.
There was no spontaneous demand from any section of the electorate for public funding of parties' electioneering costs. Other features of the present legislation had not received adequate consideration yet, including a proposal to limit what any individual could spend in a constituency campaign, while national parties remained unrestricted as to what they could spend on campaigns such as newspaper advertising, billboards and video promotions.