The defeated general election candidate, Ms Kathy Sinnott, has secured leave from the High Court to bring a petition challenging the result of last year's election in Cork South Central on grounds including a claim that the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, did not include his full electoral expenses in his statutory declaration of those expenses.
Had Mr Martin included the full expenses, Ms Sinnott, who stood as an Independent and is a well-known campaigner for the rights of the disabled, claims he would have exceeded electoral spending limits.
She also claims two other elected Fianna Fáil TDs in the constituency, Mr Batt O'Keeffe and Mr John Dennehy,would have exceeded the spending limits had their expenses statements included certain costs, particularly of running a constituency party office as opposed to that of an individual candidate. Such costs had been deemed by the High Court to give sitting candidates an unfair advantage over non-sitting contenders.
It was also claimed the mobile phone costs of Mr Martin and Mr Dennehy, and the mobile phone costs of their staff, were not included in their expenses statements.
This alleged failure to include the costs referred to would have materially affected the result of the general election in Cork South Central, Ms Sinnott claims.
Ms Sinnott's electoral agent, Mr Padraig Ó Feinneadha, of Belgooly, Cork, said he had examined election expenses statements of several Fianna Fáil Ministers, and these included items listed as expenditure which did not appear in Mr Martin's statement.
For example, expenses met out of public funds were declared by three Ministers, Mr Frank Fahy, Mr Brian Cowen and Mr Noel Dempsey, as €16,123, €13,393 and €25,662 respectively. The equivalent figure for Mr Martin was €7,402.
Mr Ó Feinneadha said he believed Mr Martin's election expenses statement did not include all the expenditure which should have been included. If it had been so included, Mr Martin would have significantly exceeded expenditure limitations.
Mr Ó Feinneadha further claimed that the election spending statements furnished to the Public Office Commission by Mr Martin, Mr O'Keeffe and Mr Dennehy did not include certain expenditure. If costs associated with running a constituency party office as opposed to the office of the individual candidates were included, he believed all three would be over their allowed spending limit.
Mr Ó Feinneadha also said the norm for Fianna Fáil TDs in five-seater constituencies was to allocate half the spending limit of some €38,000 to the party, a figure of €19,046. He said Mr Martin had allocated €15,546 while Mr O'Keeffe had allocated €18,796.
There was no logical explanation as to why the two FF candidates did not assign the norm amount of €19,046 to Fianna Fáil. If Mr Martin had assigned €19,046, he would have exceeded his spending limit by some €2,500, Mr Ó Feinneadha said. A similar allocation by Mr O'Keeffe would have put him within €285 of the limit. After a marathon count and recount, Ms Sinnott was narrowly defeated by six votes for the last seat by Mr Dennehy.
