I've often had my leg pulled by English friends about how money-ridden southern politics seems. The Mahon tribunal findings seem to accord with this view of the essential corruptness of Irish politics.
I remember the excitement of going to the hearings in Dublin Castle in
2007 - what would Bertie come up with next to explain the cash?
On the other hand, I do miss the fact that Bertie was in many ways the
kind of authentic Dub often missing from Irish politics. And there was
something vaguely unsavoury about Clongowes-educated barristers forensically
examining one of their less privileged peers.
There were echoes of some of this at revelations last Sunday morning
that a Hackney-born and self-made Tory party treasurer had had to resign
after Sunday Times footage emerged in which he is reportedly heard to
say:
"Two hundred grand to 250 is premier league … what you would get is,
when we talk about your donations the first thing we want to do is get
you at the Cameron/Osborne dinners...
"If you're unhappy about something, we will listen to you and put it
into the policy committee at No 10 – we feed all feedback to the policy
committee."
In his resignation statement, the treasurer said: Clearly there is no
question of donors being able to influence policy or gain undue access
to politicians.
I should have been rather disappointed had I invested £250k to have my
policy feedback fed to the policy committee at No 10 only to find out
that there was no question of donors being able to influence policy
after all.
But mainly this all goes to show that though there are immense differences between the political shenanigans in the five jurisdictions which characterise these islands, there certainly are some similarities.
