DUBLIN – Ireland’s public expenditure minister Paschal Donohoe faced mounting pressure to quit on Tuesday after a business friend admitted he gave Donohoe undisclosed assistance in back-to-back elections contrary to charity rules.
Donohoe, president of the Eurogroup and one of Ireland’s most important politicians on the EU stage, will face hostile questioning in parliament later Tuesday – his second time Suddenly on the hot seat last week. But government officials told POLITICO that they expected Donohoe to vigorously defend his ethical record.
At stake is the stability and potential survival of Ireland’s coalition government, which just last month underwent a pre-agreed reshuffle of top posts between Michael Martin’s Fianna Fáil and Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael. While Varadkar became prime minister and Martin foreign minister, Fine Gael’s Donohoe handed over the key finance portfolio to Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath, but retained his Eurogroup leadership position in Brussels.
Donohoe apologized to parliament last Wednesday after admitting that his 2016 re-election campaign had failed to disclose donations from construction chief Michael Stone, currently under investigation by the Standards in Public Office Commission.
Donohoe’s explanation cut no ice with main opposition party Sinn Féin, whose finance spokesman, pierce doherty repeatedly asked him to confirm whether Stone had also provided undisclosed assistance to Donohoe’s 2020 campaign.
While an off-balance Donohoe didn’t respond directly, Stone finally did Tuesday morning — and Confirmed He had provided similar assistance in 2020 as well.
Stone, founder of a multinational construction firm called The designer groupimmediately resigned from two government-appointed positions on the boards of land development agency And a Inner City Development Trust,
At face value, the donations described by Stone look like the tiniest of potatoes, just €1,240 in 2016 and €1,406 in 2020. In both cases, Stone said, he had paid six of his own construction workers to put up Donohoe campaign posters. Around his Dublin Central constituency, using a Designer Group work van.
However, many politicians—even within Donohoe’s own party—don’t believe the receipt-free figures—because they don’t reflect their experience of real-world campaign costs. under Irish ethics lawCampaigns must report commercial costs, even if the services are being offered at a discount or free of charge.
Most say that the cost of putting up the right posters should be closer to €5,000 per campaign. Such a bill would have to be financed by many donors to stay within the law’s limit of €1,000 per individual donation or arguably in Stone’s case, the lower €200 limit that applies to unregistered corporate donors.
Yet Donohoe is further arguing that Stone’s newly revealed donations do not breach those limits, as they were not donations to him at all, but to the wider Fine Gael campaign in Dublin Central. One problem with that argument is that when Fine Gael fielded two candidates in a multi-seat constituency, Stone’s activists put up posters featuring Donohoe.
While many supporters express disbelief that a scandal involving such a minor sum could lead to Donohoe’s ouster, Ireland has a history of toppling senior figures over scandals initially seen as minor matters. The most notable recent example is the previous European Commissioner for Ireland, Phil Hogan, who was forced to leave As head of business in 2020 for failing to comply with Ireland’s pandemic quarantine rules.
Many politicians and staffers recalled a famous quote from the late Prime Minister Albert Reynolds as they chatted in the parliamentary corridors on Tuesday. In 1994 he was considered a potential Nobel Peace Prize candidate for his role in delivering an Irish Republican Army ceasefire – only to be voted out of office within weeks by unhappy coalition partners.
“It’s amazing,” Reynolds told reporters After his Out of the Blue Oyster. “You cross the big hurdles, and when you reach the small ones, you’re stuck.”