With no Flood tribunal findings to guide it, the electorate could well be voting for candidates who got money from property developers, writes Paul Cullen
How many of the 9,000 people who voted for Ray Burke in the last election would have done so if they had known what we know now about his financial arrangements?
Over 4,000 voters gave Liam Lawlor their first preference last time out, but hardly any of these would have been aware of his financial arrangements.
Yet Burke and Lawlor are far from being the only politicians to have come to the attention of the Flood tribunal, and Lawlor is by no means the only politician to feature on Frank Dunlop's list of payments.
Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are running candidates in this election who, by their own admission, have received money from Dunlop and other developers. In many, but not all cases, the sums they acknowledge receiving are small. In no instance does any politician accept a linkage exists between the payments they got and their votes on rezoning decisions.
Yet Dunlop's side of the story has not been heard, apart from a brief snippet at the tribunal over two years ago, when he listed but did not publicly name over 20 politicians to whom he made payments.
Since then, he has provided the tribunal privately with further information on payments to politicians.
In addition to this, the tribunal is investigating many other alleged payments to politicians which have no connection with Dunlop.
Indeed, one of the reasons the tribunal has taken so long is because of the mountain of allegations which has come its way.
These are difficult issues for journalists to treat. On the one hand, even after all these years, these are still just allegations. Politicians have a right to their good name as much as other citizens.
As in the case of Mary Harney this week, the journalistic shorthand of "being investigated by the Flood tribunal" can be unsatisfactory and incomplete.
Every single politician who sat on Dublin County Council in the 1980s, and many others, are under some sort of tribunal scrutiny, but the level of this examination varies from case to case.
On the other hand, the allegations about wrongdoing in the planning system are so numerous and so serious they cannot simply be ignored in this election. That might suit the politicians but it's hardly fair to the electorate.
Journalists knew about the allegations swirling about Ray Burke during the last election campaign, but dared not name him because of the libel laws. Similar concerns inhibit their work today.
The tribunal was set up in 1997, at the start of this Government's life. One might have expected some kind of closure to its work before this administration expired, but this hasn't happened.
We don't have a tribunal report with clear findings, and we haven't had hearings on Quarryvale and the other controversial rezonings.
So, just as in 1997, the voters are left in the dark about the standing of the candidates who are seeking their support. Given the volume of allegations, and what happened last time, it seems inevitable that some of today's candidates will end up under closer investigation by the tribunal.
Indeed, some of those elected may end up being the focus of the kind of attention meted out to Burke and Lawlor.
After Dunlop's revelations two years ago, the two main parties set up limited investigations into the behaviour of their councillors in Dublin. A number of councillors in both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil got into difficulties during these inquiries, yet even this has proved no bar to them standing as party candidates, apart from Lawlor.
One thing is clear; most of the politicians themselves won't be raising the issue. Fianna Fáil's manifesto refers to corruption delicately as the "events of the past" before promising vaguely to "see through" issues arising from the tribunals.
Fine Gael's document is even vaguer; the only mention of the issue is a promise to prosecute corruption and fraud "as severely as other serious crimes".