Politicians should face “fixed fines” for not fully or properly declaring or disclosing all of their interests, a Government review into Ireland’s ethics laws has found.
The review has also called for senior ministers and Government officials to be required to disclose more detailed information about their interests and liabilities, including their spouses' interests.
The Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) has called for additional powers and for existing ethics laws to be reformed since the mid-200s.
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The Review of Ireland’s Statutory Framework for Ethics in Public Office, completed in December 2022, was published by Paschal Donohoe's Department of Public Expenditure and Reform on Tuesday.
It calls for politicians to face fines for not declaring their interests properly.
The review states that the SIPO framework created in the 1990s emphasises transparency and “mitigating the conflicts of interest that can foster corrupt practices”.
However, it warns that this is not “complemented by effective sanctions”.
It states that SIPO investigations can be “lengthy and cumbersome” and could be seen as a “waste of resources” if there are “little or no consequences”.
“It is recommended that a range of appropriate sanctions is developed with fixed fines for breaches of disclosure obligations combined with the benefits of the existing inquisitorial model,” the report stated.
The report also calls for an extension on what politicians have to declare. It says that Ministers, Ministers of State, Chairs of Oireachtas Committees, Ministerial Advisers and Secretaries General should have to declare all liabilities over €50,000.
They should also have to declare “registrable interests” of a spouse, civil partner or child that could “materially influence public functions”. This would be done on a confidential basis to SIPO.
Other recommendations in the report include that the legislative framework for ethics should be underpinned by a set of overarching “integrity principles”, new specific statutory prohibitions, including on the use of insider information, strengthening SIPO and that any post-term employment restrictions or “cooling off periods” for elected officials/public servants should address matters not already covered by lobbying regulation.
It also called for SIPO to be restructured.
Over the past five years, SIPO has received more than 300 complaints and published 18 investigation reports. Some 127 complaints were received in 2021, compared to just 60 the year beforehand.
The publication of the report comes following several controversies engulfing ministers’ failure to properly declare interests and expenses.
In August, Fianna Fáil TD Robert Troy was forced to stand down from his role as Minister of State in the Department of Enterprise when it emerged that he had not declared all of his property interests.
In January, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe was quizzed in the Dáil over his failure to declare that businessman Michael Stone paid workers to hang posters for him in both the 2016 and 2020 General Election.
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