If a person is elected to our national parliament as an independent candidate, i.e. not affiliated to any particular political party, it seems that they can claim and extra €41k a year on top of the €100k+ salary and expenses (which can, for TDs in more remote constituencies – like Mayo I assume, amount to a further €100k or so). This extra money is supposed to compensate for the fact that they are not backed by a ‘party machine’ and hence incur extra expenses.

So a TD could receive as much as €250k per year – that’s a quarter of a million euros of taxpayers money. Now hold on, I musn’t get side tracked here, the point of this post is not about the ridiculously large salaries these people are paid – even more if you get to be a minister of course – and the absurdly generous pension arrangements. No, this is about that ‘independent’s bonus’.

Let’s just throw in a bit of abbreviated background here, regarding Ms. Flynn. She used to work in a bank. According to a report on RTÉ, the state broadcaster, in the course of her work at the bank she would encourage people to evade tax. That’s evade, not avoid. It’s illegal. Well, she denied it of course and sued RTÉ for libel. She lost. Costs were awarded against her, to the tune of €2.4 million, she was thrown out of Fianna Fáil, her party, and became an independent. She was still an independent when she was re-elected in 2007 and so gets the little bonus. However, in 2008 she was allowed to rejoin the Fianna Fáil party because by then she had settled with RTÉ (by paying half the money she owed) but she continued to claim her independent’s bonus, which she’s entitled to do until the next election, apparently.

She reckons there’s nothing wrong with this and anyway the money is used for the benefit of her constituents.

As you can imagine, this has caused a bit of a stink. With the global financial crisis, the banks losing all our money, the economy in recession, businesses closing down, people losing their jobs and the government building up a debt of biblical proportions, you can see why some people might have a problem with Ms. Flynn claiming a bonus to which, morally at least, she is clearly not entitled. It’s OK though, the Taoiseach (prime minister, leader of the goverment) has had a word with her and she’s decided not to continue claiming the money after all. And she’s very upset at all the horrid things that people have been saying about her in recent days.

For the sake of fairness, I should point out that she is not the only TD accused of this sort of behaviour, so that’s all right then.

When will politicians learn? Will they ever learn? Or do they, if fact, know exactly what they are doing and just hope they can get away with it for long enough to feather the nest with exquisite Hungarian goose down? After all, corruption, fraud and generally dodgy behavior is hardly unknown in the world of politics. Our previous Taoiseach, the great Bertie Ahern, resigned because the questions about where he got his money were becoming a bit difficult to answer. [Interestingly, these questions were posed by a 'Tribunal of Inquiry' set up by the Bert to look into corruption in public life. Talk about 'hoisted by his own petard'.] The late Charles Haughey, another former Taoiseach, was really quite bent. Every country has similar exemplars. It would be very easy to wonder if there are any honest politicians, or is that an oxymoron?

Perhaps the real question is why, oh why, oh why, do we keep voting for these individuals? Maybe it’s because there isn’t any real choice.

The irregularities have come to light as part of the ongoing Tribunal of Inquiry into (primarily) planning corruption in Dublin. This Tribunal was, ironically, set up by ‘The Bert’ himself in 1997 when either he must have believed his unofficial nickname, ‘The Teflon Taoiseach’ or he never thought it would get as far as investigating him. Basically a lot of money has been discovered in Bertie’s pockets, safes, bank accounts and so on and our man is unable to give satisfactory explanations of where the money came from.

Bertie has, bit by bit, been telling us that the money came from a combination of his salary, gifts and loans from friends when he’s been a bit short, and political donations. His story seems to be full of holes; kind of surprising for an accountant. Google him, or the Mahon Tribunal, and you’ll find reams of information about it so I won’t go into the details. Suffice to say that it all looks pretty suspicious to me. And to the press. And to the Revenue Commissioners. In fact, no-one believes him. He will not last long, though he seems determined to prolong his own agony.

My point in writing about this is that even his most vocal friends, who also appear not to believe him, now seem to be trotting out the argument that it’s not just Bertie who is corrupt, but in fact everyone is corrupt and so why should we pick on our poor leader? It’s not right to single him out when any of us, in his position, would have done the same. It’s just so unfair that the press and opposition parties are hounding him, insisting that his affairs should be transparent, black and white.

So there you have it. We should not expect our most senior politician to be honest. It’s fine for him to be ‘on the take’ just like everyone else in this great little country.

I was brought up to believe that just because your friend puts his hand in the fire doesn’t mean you should too. Does this not equally apply to the cookie jar? If some fella robs a bank, should we all go out and rob one too?

What kind of lesson are we teaching the young (and not so young) if we adopt this kind of attitude? What hope is there for society and the rule of law? If this is how it will be then perhaps we should welcome global warming and the destruction of the human race!