De Valera party leaders’ allowance legacy lives on
BACK in 1938, Taoiseach E´amon de Valera came up with the idea of paying an allowance to the leader of the largest and second largest opposition parties to help them keep their party’s door open and the light lighting.
The little remarked upon measure ticked on quietly until the autumn of 2000 when it emerged that back in 1990 Charles Haughey had given Sligo Leitrim FF TD John Ellis £26,000 from the fund to stave off Ellis’s bankruptcy.
If Ellis had been declared bankrupt he would have been disqualified from the Dáil and Haughey’s FF PD Coalition would have lost its majority.
The leaders’ allowance had been codified under Section 10 of the Ministerial and Parliamentary Offices Act 1938. But this law gave extremely wide latitude to the party leaders to spend it as they saw fit.
The Finance Minister of the day told the Dáil: “the leaders will naturally decide in what manner that money is going to be disbursed, and we are not going to interfere with their discretion.”
This carte blanche approach was accepted by all governments and parties ever since, with only minimal changes as to the detail.
The allowance payment was extended to the governing party in 1973.
In 1996, the rules were varied to specify that the money should be spent for parliamentary back up, including staffing and research. It cannot be spent on electioneering. It was also established that Independent TDs should get an annual allowance, which is currently £10,000.
The allowance is indexed to civil service pay rises.
There is a set formula for calculating the payment. Parties with one to five TDs get £31,000 per year; the next five TDs qualify the party for £25,000 each; 10 to 60 TDs qualify for over £12,000 each; once the number exceeds 60 TDs the party gets over £6,000 for each TD.
The governing party has its total allowance cut by one third because it has the benefit of civil service back up. That largely explains why Fianna Fáil gets less than Fine Gael at the moment.
The allowance is not usually supervised by the Comptroller and Auditor General. But legislation adopted in 1993 does allow for such a possibility.
© Irish Examiner, 2000