DUBLIN – Could failure to report election expenses worth less than €5,000 claim Ireland’s finance expert Paschal Donohoe, president of the Eurogroup, the political scalp?
The Dubliner, who has barely put a foot wrong as a cabinet minister since 2016, faced parliamentary grilling on Wednesday over his admission that his election campaign that year had not declared a donation of staff and resources from the subsidiary businessman.
Ireland’s electoral law also requires modest amounts to be reported and sets a limit of €200 for most corporate donations and €1,000 from individuals. Opposition leaders accused Donohoe of both deliberately violating it and trying over the years to cover it up.
“Honesty and integrity are paramount in public life, and I am very sorry this has happened. I sincerely regret this situation and the part I played in it,” Donohoe told the Irish Parliament after the five-week Christmas recess. told Dáil Éireann on opening day.
“Minister Donohoe cannot escape the fact that he broke the rules by receiving this donation, and has since concocted a narrative that has changed so many times that his credibility has crumbled,” said a member of the main opposition Sinn Féin party. Leader Mary Lou McDonald said she could seek a motion of no confidence – the latest to test the strength of Ireland’s three-party coalition.
His attack reflected battle lines already drawn well ahead of Ireland’s likely 2025 election.
That contest may come too soon if populist and republican Sinn Féin can inflict enough damage on the establishment parties of Irish politics: Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael and Foreign Affairs Minister Michael Martin’s Fianna Fáil.
Fine Gael soon to face ethics double whammy over Christmas break Varadkar replaces Martin in the top job as part of their 2020 alliance deal.
Last week a junior Fine Gael minister, Damien English, resigned from his position after admitting he concealed the ownership of a property on planning applications and government conflict of interest forms. The government has refused to allow the opposition to question English, who remains a legislator.
The government similarly rejected demands from the opposition on Wednesday to be allowed to question Donohoe, who instead made a speech – then sat quietly through a series of opposition attacks.
He rounded off his central claims: that he learned only recently of the 2016 donation from Michael Stone, the head of the construction firm, a friend later appointed to two government positions; that the total value of the donation was only €1,240; and that this figure may be divided in three ways to keep each subtotal below the legal limit.
Donohoe said the businessman had paid six of his construction workers a total of €1,100 – the equivalent of €183 each – for four days’ work to erect and remove Donohoe’s election posters in his Dublin central district, where Donohoe had faced a battle against Sinn Féin’s chairman. retained both Their parliamentary seats in a three-seat constituency, with MacDonald topping the poll, Donohoe second. Donohoe’s poster team used a van bearing the corporate logo of Stone’s company.
Donohoe said the van should have been registered as a corporate donation worth €140, below the €200 threshold for the announcement, while only €917 of workers’ wages had been given before the election, the rest after. This also means it complies with the €1,000 limit, he said.
Several MPs said these figures were suspiciously low, given that the cost of their similar contracted work for the poster was closer to €5,000.
Roisin Shortall, co-leader of the Social Democrats, mocked the calculations as the work of “a finance minister who can’t keep track of his election donations and expenses”.
“Looks like you’ve got the deal of the century, I must say,” he told Donohoe on the floor, describing his unrecorded figures as “very convenient.”
Still, she said, Donohoe is legally bound to declare the market-value of the costs, even if he didn’t pay a penny for the work. “You cannot rely on partner rates for the purposes of your returns, Minister.”
Like many speakers with experience of their own poster-heavy campaigns, Shortall reportedly questioned the basic math of the service supplied by Stone – six workers erected the posters in four days for barely a grand and taken down
“If this is true, I can only imagine TD’s going to panic [lawmakers] for designer group [Stone’s company] Requesting that they put up their posters in the next election,” she said. “We see all the signs of reverse-engineering it to fit in with the spending limit.”
Donohoe, who became Ireland’s minister for public expenditure as part of the December reshuffle, was to oversee reform of ethics laws as part of his new brief. He confirmed that he would be handing the role over to Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath, the new finance chief. Standards in Public Office Commission Investigates whether the 2016 donation and lack of disclosure broke the law.