If stone was still a member of those 2 boards could he be called to face questioning by the PAC? If so it's obvious why he's jumped ship.
He's dead! Government will be raging the spent so much capital defending him but he's way beyond coming back from this now.
I still think he'll survive. At this stage I'm not too bothered either way. Nothing that happens now will lessen Fine Gaels incineration of standards in public office and he'd just be replaced by another corupt fucker anyway.
FG love having a pop at SF for declaring money north and south as if they're 2 separate entities, had to laugh at PD basically doing the same thing today, separating donations to FG Dublin central and the FG party,
That Conor Riordan fella out giving it his all in defense of Paschal by attacking Sinn Fein. When questioned on FG's past he apparently doesn't live in the past because it's the past He was encouraging people to bring a few €10 notes into town to hand out to the homeless at Christmas. Something snidey about him.
SF making another amendment to their 2016 General Election expenses. The mud slinging in the dail is going to ramp up significantly.
6 undeclared invoices with one of them not even paid? Sinn Fein can't have any complaints that mud is getting slung at them. That's piss poor.
If you barely scratch below the surface, every party will have this. Glass houses and political footballs.
Definitely,and bring it all out into the open I say. Campaign finance rules are far more important than the media and politicians caught breaking them want everybody to believe. Avoiding a situation where it comes down to which candidate spends the most money is a big deal for our democracy. If a candidate got caught voting twice in an election he'd be done,and rightly so but that's one vote. Funnelling even a few extra grand into your campaign can be worth way more votes than that and could easily be the difference between winning and losing,so why do we pretend it's not as serious? We were wondering how Donohue was going to get out of his mess,and here it is. We'll get told they're all the same and it was blown out of all proportion,which is not even close to true. He won a seat in a tight election that was worth millions to him over his career in wages and pension benefits alone,and that's without what the influence that goes with it is worth. He was in charge of overseeing these standards too,but has deliberately ignored them,lied through his teeth and reverse engineered his excuses and also got the donor involved to lie like fuck to try and get everybody to move on. And that's before the possibility of corruption in handing out state contracts. That's not the same as oversights that logically have no real benefit for the parties or politicians involved(not that certain instances shouldn't be investigated too) but that will be all lumped in together. Again they've succeeded in normalising corruption, and the standards in public office sink lower because of it. And in 20 years when we're having some tribunal or other and all the shady shit that happened comes out, the people who insisted this is all a storm in a teacup will either be long gone,or pretending they had no idea what was going on.
Paul Murphy mentioned it in the dail the other day, PD tried to divide the corporate payment by Mr Stone in to 2 separate payments so that they conveniently fit under the level, a certain amount went to FG Dublin central and the rest went to the FG party, Murphy said that didn't matter, the 2 amounts combined are above the limit for an undeclared corporate donation. Strange that none of the media have mentioned that since. This morning on morning Ireland fionnan Sheehan (I think) said the donation MLMD received should go to the SF party coffers even if it was given to SF Dublin central so that confirms what Murphy said the other day.