Box o’ Receipts

Originally uploaded by Jim FraziDiner

Ding Dong, The Bull is gone.

After dogged pursuit by Ken Foxe and backup work by Gavin Sheridan and Mark Coughlan at Gavin’s Blog and TheStory.ie, Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue has been exposed as a spendthrift and after sustained pressure has finally announced he will retire, his massive expense bill having finally caught up with him.

The power of the FOI has been, arguably, the biggest revelation in this saga, as well as the amount of work that it takes from a journalist to expose and wear down one single Fianna Fail TD, despite a litany of financial abuse. Digging stoically through reams of paperwork, while not glamorous, yields results.

It can’t stop there, though, and with all the dust raised by Joxer’s departure, the danger is that the end goal, political transparency, becomes obscured. Joxer could becomes but one high-profile sacrificial lamb, while the core problem remains. What is really needed is a reform of the system of unvouched expenses, something that makes TD’s spend completely transparent to every voter. So who’s next on the chopping block? And will other journalists now take up the mantle of FOI pursuit more virulently?

I’ve often heard it said that anyone who wants to be a politician should be automatically barred from office. Perhaps one way of making the post less attractive to those who see the perks and think they would make it all worthwhile is to make their spending immediately visible. We need a glass wall into the goings on of Dail Eireann.We need to see into the worm farm.

Joxer may, through his iniquity, bequeath us a more transparent system and his departure could improve Irish politics beyond the simple fact of his replacement. But those who claim that John O’Donoghue went into politics for all the right reasons should remember that he’s leaving it for all the wrong ones.