TDs can all relax as poster boy Paschal proves Sipo is toothless

HERE’S how you can tell that we don’t have a standards in public office regime that’s worthy of the name – there’s isn’t one politician making a serious demand that it be scrapped and replaced with a functioning, sharptoothed watchdog.

They’d rather pretend this is all about Paschal Donohoe and his election posters, and a piddling sum of an undeclared political contribution, rather than acknowledge the real scandal: there are no consequences for breaking the rules.

The current faux-outrage over the minister and his election expenses is nothing more than a cheap fairground three-card-trick, where the key to fooling the unsuspecting mark is to get them looking in the wrong direction. That way, we don’t notice the conspiracy of connivance and neglect that has sustained the current excuse for a ‘political standards’ authority, when it’s been clear for years that it’s not fit for purpose.

Because if we had any proper standards in public office, if we had an agency capable of exacting accountability and enforcing rules, then people wouldn’t keep flouting them.

If Paschal Donohoe, below, knew there would be hell to pay if he didn’t account for every item of his election expenditure, he would have accounted for every item of his election expenditure.

He is, by all accounts, a politician of integrity and there’s no suggestion that he personally benefited from any of the episodes now exercising his political opponents so heatedly.

The problem is that we have a ‘standards’ system that can’t distinguish between corruption, sloppiness and inadvertence, and so fails to punish any of them at all.

If Sinn Féin knew that simply expressing ‘regret’ for its own failures to disclose election expenses wouldn’t cut it with the Standards In Public Office Commission (Sipo), they would not have failed to disclose those expenses. This week’s revelation about Sinn Féin’s own ‘oversights’ is not the first time the party has had to apologise for shortcomings in its accounting: it had ‘accidentally omitted’ to declare a €7,000 outlay on an opinion poll in 2020. All it ever takes, though, is an expression of regret and an amendment of the record – once you’ve been caught – and that’s pretty much the end of the matter.

Imagine trying that excuse with the Revenue, for example, when you’ve been caught under-declaring your income or ‘accidentally omitting’ to pay your tax. If you reduce your VAT bill by wrongly labelling apples as garlic, say, and if you fail to amend that error until the Revenue uncovers the ‘oversight’, you could face six years in jail. But if you forget to reveal that you own a house or two on your annual declaration of interests as an Oireachtas member… tumbleweed.

Just look at what transpired last August when Fianna Fáil’s Robert Troy was forced to resign as a junior minister after he was found to have failed to declare several properties in the register of members’ interests. Within weeks, no fewer than seven other members had come forward having discovered that they, too, needed to amend their own declarations, either for completeness or clarity. Had there been consequences for all of those omissions, then perhaps Damien English might have felt sufficiently concerned to fess up about the house he failed to reveal, having denied its existence on a planning application.

Both junior ministers Troy and English resigned because of public uproar – not because of any sanction imposed by our so-called Standards in Public Office Commission.

On both occasions, political rivals lined up to lambast the ministers involved, to demand their resignation as ministers (but not, funnily enough, as Dáil members), and to keep the focus of their criticism firmly on the man instead of on the ball.

Time and again, Sipo has been shown to be incapable of policing and enforcing political standards, either out of incompetence, inefficiency or design – all vague rules, confusing regulations and opaque guidelines eminently suited to misinterpretation.

The argument that this is a trivial matter compared to health and homelessness is a red herring: if there are rules to be observed by politicians, then the public is entitled to expect compliance, and to see defaults penalised. But time and again, Sipo has been exposed as utterly toothless, and somehow there’s no wild clamour to beef it up or shut it down. And as long as politicians conspire to pretend this current row is just about Paschal and the posters, you won’t hear it this time either.