The commonly held belief is that donations by corporation or any sort of company (sole trader or partnership) are all about currying favour with the powers that be so that they can get the inside track on some decision that might affect them specifically or their business generally or help them in the awarding of some contract paid for by the public purse. In other words it is about getting one up on your competitors.

Yet what if the main reason is more of a preventative nature than that of a cure. What if companies give money to parties either in or likely to be in government in order to avoid being singled out for exclusion or persecution by the powers that be? What it is less about a culture of avarice and more a culture of fear. Might it be more about damage avoidance than it is about actual gain? Have we not had governments in the past populated by people that might be vindictive enough to target some companies or individuals for not donating to them or their party, of failing to tow the line? And that the lesson learned was one taking preventable action to ensure that they did not fall foul of the whims of minister X.

So it is just possible that such donations are less about securing a leg up and more about not being left behind if everyone else is doing it.

The 2007 election was held on 24 May 2007 after Bertie called for the dissolution on 29th April  - a Sunday. The election campaign took place over a gap of 21 working days or so. Bank holidays and Sundays are not included in the minimum/maximum period that a campaign must take place over. Christmas has 3 bank holidays but many people take considerably more time off over that period. Would it in fact suit the government better to have the election campaign over a 4 week period almost 2 of which would could not be campaigned during for practical reasons? Or if it is looking like the budget will not pass is it better to campaign for as long as possible in advance of polling day or to have the campaigning time as truncated as possible so that the opposition can’t convince the public which way to jump?

So it now appears that Ivor Callely did indeed transfer ownership of the holiday home in Kilcrohane in April of this year to his wife. Yet given that he was transferring it to her and must thus in theory have owned it prior to this, he didn’t list it in his register of interests in 2006 while a TD nor at the end of last year for 2009 while a member of the Seanad. So is it the case that any property that his wife had an interest in with him wasn’t view by him as needing to be listed? Given that the property was bought in 1992 it seems odd that it just slipped his mind that he owned it for more than a decade and a half.

And to add some local juice to the story the law firm of Sen. Denis O’Donovan (O’Donovan Murphy & Co) handled the land cert for this property back in the mid 90s! This would be the same senator who was on the committee. While there might well have been no contact, it would seem that to ensure that all was seen to be above board that the good Senator might have informed the committee of this and removed himself from reviewing the case.

So it is beginning to look like Ivor, at some point in the recent past, might have been too clever by half and that all “his” property is not in his name at all but rather it is in his wife’s or other family members names and that this might be the cause of some difficulty for him in establishing what is and is not his principal residence. Cos he might well own nothing and have no rental agreement with anyone and thus not be able to prove that he in fact lives or has a principal residence anywhere. Just why, you might ask, would someone transfer ownership of their assets to others? Well, one situation in which it would make sense was if you were a public representative and wanted to avoid declaring these interests in the declaration of members interests. Did Ivor Callely do this? I don’t know and I’m not going to say he did this.

It is also worth noting that “Mr Callely told the committee the house in west Cork had been for sale since “04/05-ish”. He said he had never denied it was for sale and insisted he would not benefit, in terms of capital gains tax liability, if it was sold.” So he won’t benefit from it at all, again seeming to mean he does not own it or have a financial interest in it. But this begs the questions did he ever own it and if he did when and why did he transfer the ownership.

Now let’s review someone else whose family situation meant they couldn’t be 100% clear with the public about their finances, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Bertie had a legal separation agreement with his wife and the terms and details of this could not be made public. This meant we, the taxpayers and as voters his employers,  couldn’t find out exactly what he owned and when he got it or what he transferred to her and his children once the separation was agreed. All very inconvenient the Taoiseach told us as it might he couldn’t be completely transparent with us the voters though he really really wanted to be.

One other thing which is probably entirely unrelated, as we were assured that the former Taoiseach was a God fearing man and didn’t hold with this sort of thing, is the provisions of divorce law in Ireland. These say you might, in order to file for divorce, need to show that you had been legally separated from your spouse for or living apart for a number of years before a divorce might be granted. I’m not sure if this legal agreement needs to actually be publicly available or acknowledged once it is drawn up all proper and legal like and is agreeable to both parties. So such an agreement might exist and we the public would be none the wiser.

One can imagine the situation and in truth rather untenable legal position that a person might hypothetically find themselves in if say they had transferred all their property to their spouse for some reason or other and were years later to find themselves because of changed personal circumstances agreeing a separation agreement with their spouse. After all, once their spouse’s name was on the property they couldn’t legally argue that it was meant to be still their property really. It’s like something out of a badly plotted rom-com.

But back to Ivor, and away from these hypothetical and entirely unconnected people, he continues to defend himself before the Seanad committee who are it seems are bullying him, just like some other people were bullying Sen. Mullen last week. To add insult to injury it turns out the state is fronting Ivor €50 to turn up to an investigation into his circumstances. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

The Oireachtas Communications, Energy and Natural Resources committee has complied a report into using the cell broadcast facility in emergency situations. It’s a useful idea but then I would say that as the idea that we should look into using cell broadcast for emergencies was mine. I can’t help feeling a bit like that character playing by Arrabella Weir who suggests solutions to problems who no one listens to but they then go on to repeat her idea as if it was their own.

And this experience plays into one of the problems we have with the development of a knowledge economy, one of the most basic components for a knowledge economy to work is that there be appropriate attribution and credit given to all concerned and that intellectual property be protected. If the culture instead is one where those who contribute to ideas or insight are not worth noting as being party to that process then why would those people choose to site here at all?

Madam, – This recent talk of a new political party is all very interesting until you listen to what different people say they want from one, and it turns out they all want entirely different things. More liberal, more traditional, less taxes, more spending, both more right wing and more left wing.

The dull grown-up reality is that political parties are implicit coalitions of many different interests that work to find common cause with one another. In Irish politics, our so-called Independents are really people who can’t bring themselves to find sufficient common cause with anyone else for long enough to agree a party name and a date for their next meeting. So how could they bring the electorate together in a common cause? They can’t and never will.

What is needed is not new parties, but a renewed focus on the part of the electorate on what it is they really want from politics. Do they want to ensure there is a bed just for them in the hospital or sufficient beds for all who need them? Do they want lower taxes just for themselves or a fair tax system for everyone? Do they want public spending restraint in all areas except the ones that directly affect them, or do they want real reform of public services so that the service exists to do what it is tasked with but with no hiding places for waste and personal empire building?

Only when the people genuinely change what they want will it change what they get from politics. That’s only the first – but necessary – step. – Yours, etc,

You can Vote for the Gardiner Street Gospel Choir to sing in at the opening O2 Challenge match in the Aviva stadium on July 31st. Voting opened at 12pm Monday 6th July 2010 and will close on Thursday 8th July 2010 at 12pm. You can vote only once per day and per email address but that would seem to imply that you can vote every day! Well, that would be today and tomorrow.

Spread the word! I believe they sang for the 2009 blog awards so surely the Irish blogorati would help them out.

Over on political reform one of the most commented pieces in recent times concerns the description of the new Fine Gael front bench as ‘Male, stale and pale’. This description is in itself ironic given the complete absence of any women in the self described progressive parties like the current SF line up or even the Green party in the last Dail. Labour do better it’s true as a portion of their Dáil representation but that has as much to do with their small size as anything one or two more TDs less than they have now and their portion drops in double digit percentages.

In the comments and cited in evidence of the experience of female candidates is a survey from the National Women’s Council of Ireland, which to be honest reads like a whine  list or litany of awful things from the campaign trail that anyone who has stood in an election could offer up, whether male or female. I had a canvasser of mine who was hunted from a doorstep in a urban Dublin area by someone brandishing what they thought was a shotgun!

I would contend that an alternative view to the notion of quotas might be that we should have an electoral system that did not serve to penalise political parties for taking chances on candidates, whether male or female, who the parties fear the electorate might potentially decide to be wrong for them. This would allow the parties to be run as many candidates as were interested in offering themselves for consideration and it would be up to the public to decide who they wanted.

The fact is that PR-STV can work as a form of instant primary but parties do not do so as the issues of the potential of low transfers between party candidates might ultimately cost them seats. If total national seat allocation was based on the portion of the national vote received with the constituency election being a means to choose which specific individuals got the seat we might see more people take a chance along with parties being more willing to take that chance with them. The national seat distribution could be topped with those party or even non-party candidates who had the highest vote without being elected at the constituency level.

The other issues being raised about the nature of politics that is supposedly off putting to women, clubbishness and so on strikes me as missing the point. Convincing people to vote for you and support a course of action you advocate requires things like building alliances,  being somewhat thick skinned about personal comments etc. All of this effort against what is human behaviour is a bit like suggesting that sport X should change its rules so that more people who are currently unsuited to it could play it. But it would cease to be the sport it was. If you think soccer players should be able to catch the ball go play rugby or football, if you think people shouldn’t be able to make such rough tackles in football then play soccer. If you think that people shouldn’t club together to achieve their collective aims then electoral politics isn’t for you.

I hate to be citing Big Brother as empirical evidence of much of anything but the fact that the female contestants picked one another off while the males tended to club together until such time as they absolutely had to fight amongst themselves says something even if it’s hard to be 100% sure what it is.

Those negative comments from the NWCI Survey could be as easy found by asking male candidates of their experiences too, as I was a candidate at one time below are a few responses to the comments I’d add. The ‘quoted’ remarks are from the NCWI post on the survey

‘Negative comments from women [like] ‘politics is no place for a woman’ and ‘isn’t your husband great to be allowing you to do this’, to ‘don’t forget to make time for your children and don’t neglect you family’ really annoyed me. At the first council meeting, I was referred to as the ‘new girl’.

DK - I was in my 30s and even then most members of the party thought of me as a lad barely out of short trousers. Older people in Ireland are incredibly patronising of younger people, it’s not about gender.

‘And one elderly man on the doorstep said he would vote for me because ‘you would be handy for cooking them dinner in the council’ - he didn’t intend to be rude, but that was his truth”

DK - If people are put off by every negative comment and experience on a door step then they’ve no place contesting an election. Ask anyone who has contested an election and they will regale you with horror stories of craziness and abuse they’ve experienced. It will be a minority of people that behaviour like this but out of 100,000 people even 0.1% is a 100 people. The fact that I’d worked in IT lead some voters to think I’d be great for fixing the PCs in the council.

‘As I was on the ticket with a male, I was mostly ignored at the doors, unless I happened to be on my own - even when male party members were canvassing with me, the public tended to speak to them, not me.’

DK - It is your job as the candidate to make an impression on the voters, it is not the voter’s job to single you out. Be pushy, assert yourself. Why would someone choose to vote for someone to speak up for them when they don’t even spoke up for themselves? Remember you’ve come to their home, you have to convince them to chose you above all others.

‘Some women commented that as a young woman, I should be happy to be married and have children, not get into politics’

DK - I recall research from Liam Weeks at UCC on the 2004 local elections that showed that the worst for voting for young women were older women. But it is ironic that, if in part the under representation of women in politics is due to the behaviour of women voters that, the solution is to reward this behaviour by having a quota for those same women! Believe me a quota system won’t be seeing loads of 20 something women getting elected.

‘I stay in it (politics) because I want to continue making a difference in my area and to influence policy within a larger party, but it is frustrating!’

DK - Politics is incredible frustrating, if you can’t cope with frustration then knocking on thousands of doors isn’t for you. This like people complaining that they’d be Olympic distance champions only that they found the hours and hours of training to be really boring. If you can’t do the work involved in the training then don’t expect to get the medals. And political change takes place over decades, not a few months or years.

‘Women found it encouraging seeing a young female candidate seeking re-election’

‘Intimidation and bully tactics are still a very prevalent part of party politics. While existing female councillors are tolerated, obstacles and barriers are put in place to prevent further new female candidates from entering politics’

DK - Bullying or overbearing behaviour is common in lots of jobs, but  let’s face you have to have some sort of ego to stand in front of the public and ask that they vote for you not someone else. If you can’t cope with encountering overbearing egos then representative politics isn’t for you.

‘[There is a] Paternalistic attitude within the political party. Assumptions made that I am in more need of advice because I am a woman. Mostly among older men. Men in their 20s and 30s treat women equally on the whole’

DK - anyone who is on the younger side in any organisation will have any number of older people trying to bend their ear to provide them with the benefit of their advice and experience. Even if much of it is useless and repetitive. You will get the same from the voters. Learn listen and if it’s of any use then great but mostly you’re humouring people.

the point of multi seat constituencies is to provide the electorate with a choice not alone of party but of personnel. It is in effect a potential instant primary system. However political parties don’t see it like that and tend towards running the minimal slate of candidates because they are currently fearful of using it as such because of the effect of transfers on the number of seats they get.

What if that problem was to be corrected by the allocation of the total number of seats in the Dail on the basis of your share of national 1st preferences and not on the basis of STR_PR but that PR-STV was instead used to decide who would elected.

Leaving aside the idea of reducing the size of the Dail itself as it complicates the illustration below.

We would have 123 of the existing 166 TDs elected by from the multi-seat constituencies as at present but once the counts have completed that the remaining 43 of 166 seats would be allotted to the parties smallest first on the basis of which of their candidates had the highest number of votes before being eliminated or perhaps not eliminated but simply not elected (the last man standing scenario). It would be proportionate yet also ensure that the public were deciding who was getting elected and not some closed insider type party list system. And it wouldn’t hurt parties if they ran 8 candidates in a 5 seater which would mean more choice for the voters.