Fianna Fail politicians have disclosed the highest proportion of donations at more than €94,000.

The Labour Party declared more than €40,000 and Fine Gael more than 24,000, while the Greens disclosed just €1,200 worth of donations.

Labour Senator Alan Kelly received the highest amount at more than €35,000, followed by former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern at €19,000, which relates to the use of property at St Luke’s in Dublin.

You can look at them yourself here.

FIANNA FÁIL backbencher Beverly Flynn has put herself on a collision course with Taoiseach Brian Cowen after she said it was “a bit unfair” to suggest she give up a €41,000-a-year independent TD allowance which she will continue to claim.

Mr Cowen said at the weekend he will discuss the allowance with Ms Flynn in the next two weeks and take whatever action is appropriate.

In West Virginia the vote-flipping scandal, initially seemingly confined to one county, is now spreading to other counties and states. Having started in Jackson county, and is now spreading to Puttnam and Martinsburg counties, and even South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee: In West Virginia, voter Nancy Roe said she clicked on all her choices — including two candidates for Bluffton Town Council. But when she reviewed her selections before actually casting the ballot, she noticed that her two picks for the Bluffton Town Council did not register. Her husband had the same problem.With the assistance of a Hilton Head employee, the two attempted to re-cast their ballots. Again, it didn’t work.They resolved the problem by casting paper ballots for the council race, Nancy Roe said.”I’m real political, so I checked the ballot,” she said. “If I had only given it a quick glance and punched ‘vote,’ I never would’ve known.” The Charleston Gazette is reporting “Some early W.Va. voters angry over switched votes….three West Virginia voters complained that touch-screen machines in one county clerk’s office kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.On Thursday, the Gazette reported that despite the problems in her state, Republican West Virginia Secretary of State Betty Ireland, who selected the Omaha, Neb.-based ES&S machines, issued a response that she has confidence “the machines will provide West Virginia with a fair, accurate and clean election.”. ES&S spokesperson Ken Fields told the Mineral Wells Index by phone Thursday.“In each case, when they notified a poll worker, the poll worker was able to help voters select and ultimately cast their vote,” he added.“Every voter is required to review their selection. Voters have to review and confirm that the machine is highlighting the selection they intended,” he added, calling the machine’s ballot review process, “an important element and one more assurance that every voter can have.”“There was no indication there was any problem with the machines,” Fields concluded about the West Virginia machines. He further pointed out that the iVotronic machines have a paper backup and said each machine is “rigorously tested by independent testing experts” before leaving the company and calibrated and tested before each election. Jones said she spoke with Smith about the problems with the machine she used at the Palo Pinto County Courthouse.“Bobbie was upset at the situation when she called back,” said Jones. “She told me, ‘We had all kinds of trouble the last time we used these machines.’ She said she would call the vendor right away and they will come fix it.”“I said, ‘You need to stop using that machine right now,’” Jones added.”

Some might be tempted, from ideological bias or complacency, that this problem is localised and not representative of what will happen nationally, but I beg to differ. —At least two Palo Pinto County, Texas residents say they too experienced early voting problems when the touch-screen voting machines they used kept switching their straight-party vote from Democratic to Republican.“When I cast an early vote Wednesday at Palo Pinto County Courthouse, my vote was switched from Democrat to Republican right in front of my face — twice,” reported Lona Jones, a Precinct 1 county resident.Intending to vote straight party on the Democratic ticket, Jones said she was surprised Wednesday when the electronic voting machine “on the left as you face the machines” in the courthouse basement asked her if she wanted to cast her vote for a straight Republican ticket.Thinking she had pushed the wrong button the first time the machine “came up Republican,” Jones said she repeated her intended straight-party vote.“The second time I was sure to just touch the Democratic button,” she said, further reporting that the machine responded to her selection, “’Do you want to change your Republican straight ticket vote to a Democratic vote?’ I pressed, ‘Yes,’ then it came back up and it was a total Republican ticket again.”One election judge helped her cancel her vote and switch her to the machine on the right side, where she was able to cast her vote as she intended.“One of the ladies told me, ‘These machines don’t work well’ and, ‘These machines give us problems.’ I told her I not only didn’t want to use that machine, indicating the problematic first machine, I didn’t want anyone using that machine.”When Jones returned home, she made calls — first to County Clerk Bobbie Smith who was out of the office conducting early voting in Mineral Wells — then to other elected officials. In Tennessee some voters even claimed that the ES+S DREs even switched their votes the other way around – from McCain to Obama. But there’s no escaping the fact that 99% of the time with these e-voting glitches, it’s the Democrats who are suffering, and that can only give rise to understandible, and probably justified, suspicions that once more, the GOP are stealing an election.

In my personal opinion, as a former enthusiast for electronic-voting here in Ireland, these revelations should not be used – as many inevitably will – to bash the principle of introducing e-voting here in Ireland. If there are lessons to be learned from this debacle for us in Ireland, it is surely that the counting of the votes, and the management of the elections themselves, needs to be divorced from partisan political-figures, something that is manifestly not the case in the US. The rigging of American elections arguably handed the presidency to 3 Republicans (Ruther B Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and probably George W Bush too). As the former two elections, in 1876 and 1886 obviously precede electronic-voting, it cannot, on its own, be blamed for the unhappy tradition of voter disenfranchisement and suppression in the United States. But it certainly proves Lenin’s point that what matters is who counts, rather than who votes, in an election. The number of counties in the swing states using the ES+S DRE voting-machines are as follows: Colorado: 2, Indiana: 16 (10 as backups), Ohio: 9 (1 as backups), Pennsylvania: 23 (1 backup), West Virginia: 41 (9 backups), Virginia: 5, Wisconsin: 2 as backups, North Carolina: 37. And this doesn’t even include the innumerable number counties using ES+S optical-scanners that ‘count’ paper-ballots. Of course voter-fraud is not confined to countries using e-voting. But it certainly becomes much easier without an audit-trail, and in Pennsylvania, much of Virginia and Indiana, there will be none in this election. The election could be stolen and the probability of it being proven in court is infinitessimal. The American electoral-system is dominated by elected Secretaries of State in each of the 50 states, who are normally elected. In the case of West Virginia, Texas and South Carolina, the 3 states referred to in paragraph one, the holders of that position, Betty Ireland, Hope Andrade and Mark Hammond respectively, are all Republicans, just like Katharine Harris in the scandalous 2000 US Presidential Election in Florida. The Help America Vote (Republican) Act 2002, puts these kinds of officials more in the driving-seat of elections at state-level by requiring them to centralise electoral-registers at state level. In Ohio, which no Republican has been elected president without winning, the Republicans are trying to bully the Democratic Secretary of State to throw 200,000 supposedly ‘potentially fraudulent’ voters off the register. The House Minority Leader, John Boehner, has written a leader calling for the US Justice Department to investigate the 200,000 registrations. So we shouldn’t be too surprised if Bush intervenes to try to force Secretary Brunner to submit to the GOP’s demands. Anecdotal evidence suggests many of the registrants that do not match federal records are not fraudulent by a result of misspellings. In Montana, a state GOP official challenged nearly 6,000 voters living in Democratic strongholds who filed change of address forms with the U.S. Postal Service. Registrations must contain current addresses. After the Montana Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit challenging the request, the state party backed down. In Michigan, the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign sued the Michigan and Macomb County Republican parties after learning of an alleged Republican plan to use foreclosure filings to keep some residents who’ve failed to update their address from voting. The suit settled last week and the information will not be used. Clearly the GOP is going back to its old tricks of trying to disenfranchise minority-voters – especially African-Americans – 90% of whom vote Democratic in presidential elections. Given the disaster of Iraq and impending war with Iran, the Republicans disdain for the fight against global-warming, and the importance to the survival of Western democracy of a fair election in the United States, the world can but hope this time they are not successful.

So McGuinness‘ article is very insightful-parts of it make imminent sense, why shouldn’t departments of state be ISO compliant?

Yet this is an issue already ironed out by partnership – the old process of promotion by longevity has been merged with a desire to promote by qualifications. More interesting was the assertion that the civil service continues to employ – despite a very public freeze implemented by Charlie McCreevy and never officially lifted.

He continues:

For five years I sat on the Public Accounts Committee, with my businessman hat on, watching, with certain exceptions like the Revenue, a procession of representatives of boards and bodies peering into a series of financial black holes, completely unable to explain the mystery of it all, but content that no one would lose his job over it.

You get the drift, horrid inert civil servants are bleeding this good country dry through selfish short sightedness and a desire to cover their own arses. No resemblence to their political masters then. To his credit, McGuinness acknowledges this much – that many of the agencies lamented now were set up to put politicians a step further away from blame, accountability and uncomfortable questions (HSE anyone?). Ironically it is those agencies which are not being touched in the proposed merger, rather it is ones that do a decent job of making life more comfortable for the less well off in our society – the entire idea of having a public service in the first place.

Yes, I know the government, over time, established many of these organisations. We thought it was a good idea. It separated politicians from some things they could be blamed for interfering with. It wasn’t a good idea. Our job is to interfere, question, control, take responsibility, give leadership, admit to mistakes and do u-turns when necessary. We should do a u-turn now.

The big question is whether the bluster in the article is representative of government thinking for after all:

I am tired of committees with big names and small achievements. I’m a businessman, I know about keeping it simple, professional and tight. I don’t want to listen to or read ambiguous expensive consultants reports — the wastepaper baskets of the world are full of them.

IF that is coming from somewhere other than a corner office in Kildare Street, then it may well spell a much more difficult task reconciling parties in the partnership talks – a blessing in disguise it might appear for business, but the winter is coming.

Throughout the campaign, the organisation, responding to different media, gave differing figures about its budget, before finally settling on a €1.3 million figure, insisting that the money had come in small donations.” It is clear that if you add up the figures that the budget must have been above €2 million,” Mr Roche claimed. “It comes back to the question, where did they get their money from?”. Labour spokesman Joe Costello likewise slates the organisation as: “It is unacceptable that a single wealthy individual whose business interests are largely based outside this country should be able to use his wealth to influence the outcome of a constitutional referendum and at the same time not have to disclose the source of the funding.”.

The “yes” side are the last people with a right to lecture others on fundraising. The report of the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) for 2007 is instructive. They found that the State’s 14 registered Dáil political parties disclosed just 13 per cent of what they claimed they spent in their General Election campaigns. Sipo said political parties disclosed donations worth €266,485. Sinn Féin and the Greens received €187,223 and €29,750 respectively from their elected representatives. Fianna Fáil and Labour each disclosed three donations totalling €19,044 and €18,648 respectively. Both Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats furnished no donation statements. Fine Gael has filed no disclosures since 2001. Political-parties are only required to disclose political donations over €5,079. The report indicates that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin, the Greens and the PDs spent €10.2 million in last year’s General Election – te vast majority of which is undeclared. Fine Gael’s representatives and unsuccessful candidates disclosed in donations just 7% (€191,095) of what was actually spent, compared to 18% for Fianna Fáil (€648,000) and 1.6% (€8,079) for the Progressive Democrats.

People in glass-houses shouldn’t throw stones. The right to fundraise should not be the preserve of elected officials, who all too often in world history have been shown to be prone to inducements to act and advocate against the public good, as the Act of Union and the French parliament’s 1940 vote to establish the Vichy Regime show. We must never return to the dark says preceding the McKenna judgement which removed the ability of yes campaigns in referenda to crowd out dissenting voices by monopolising both fundraising and airtime to peddle propaganda for their causes.

It is however that time again, the two-year post-election-win belt tightening budget.

This is unsurprising considering that the income to the exchequer from construction and stamp duty, for so long that which fuelled the boom and sustained budget increases, are now in extreme contraction. As Keith has pointed out over at A Random Walk, it seems unlikely that this situation will change with the plummeting of sentiment among managers in the sector.

It is interesting then that he begins to talk of fiscal prudence to the same audience that last week began to embrace a model of Keynesianism which would spend into the impending budget deficit so as to help promote economic growth. However at a time when our population is highly overdrawn and overborrowed our government are clearly signalling that they intend to stay as debt-free as possible in the coming years. That debate is likely to be thrashed out in another month or two as we face cuts to front line services.

One particular line that gets me however is the following;

“But we must also ensure that the resources that are put into these assets are efficiently allocated and are achieving value for money. We need better performance information, more meaningful indicators and more precise measurements.”

The government has negotitated numerous social partnership agreements without a care in the world being given to audit, the tracing of money as it goes through the departmental spending system and onto the frontline. Lack of audit affects services in very real ways, it obscures those areas where money is needlessly spent and doing very little, it obscurse those parts of the bureaucracy where money becomes trapped and wasted, it obscures those whose delivery of services is bloated and inefficient for the money that is going in. Vitally is prevents the measuring of new and innovative ways of spending and distributing funds to the ends of government policy.

The entire concept of audit is bound up with information gathering and analysis. The government in this country is notable weak at gathering and maintaining the sort of information and metrics which assist in the audit process and ensure prompt delivery on policy thanks to a better system of government. Audit is not a concept of ‘small government’ but one for people who believe that a government needs to deliver what it promises in the best way possible for public and public servant alike. This government has repeatedly failed to take those lessons on board and implement those changes when it was most necessary to do so, as budgets ballooned.

It would be fine if this is something observers as well as government have remained ignorant of but there are numerous texts on both our model of delivery as well as specific sectors (notably the health service and immigration) where audit has been highlighted as a clear and necessary addition to the current system. Ahern and FF after ten years in government spending the biggest budgets ever is only now worrying about audit as the money dries up.

It seems a completely different position to that presented in May by most parties, very few were talking about losing competitiveness, losing tax revenue and managing down expectations on service improvement. Even less budgeted for it in their estimates.

As a senator she is ahead of runners like O Gorman in receiving the leaders allowance. Question is will she run in a 4-seat Dun Laoghaire constituency or consider running in Limerick (or some other constituency).

We all know the money donating and networking that gets done over at Galway races so we shouldn’t be too surprised to see it copied elsewhere

“So it is with some amusement that Guido learns that Dave is going to try something similar. According to the WestMidlands Conservatives website “the Conservative Party Treasurers’ Midlands Income Generation Board has teamed up with Uttoxeter Racecourse to provide a special fund raising race day for the Party, both locally and regionally. The Party Leader, David Cameron MP will be attending along with other members of the Shadow Cabinet as well as senior MPs and MEPs from around the country.”