Alliance tops political donations list, but concerns remain around transparency

Campaigners for more transparency on who finances Northern Ireland’s parties say the monitoring of political funding here still allows for foreign cash to leak into the system.
Only parties which have MLAs who have been voted into the Assembly qualify for public fundingOnly parties which have MLAs who have been voted into the Assembly qualify for public funding
Only parties which have MLAs who have been voted into the Assembly qualify for public funding

Friends of the Earth raised their ongoing concerns over and how and by whom local politicians are funded as the Electoral Commission published its quarterly report into party finances.

Donations to parties for the last quarter of 2021 found that Alliance received the highest figures excluding public funds at £100,600.

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Sinn Fein, which is widely believed to be the richest political party on the island, reported that it received £11,316 when public funding was excluded. The Green Party received no money from any private donors.

The Conservative Party reported that it obtained £11,591 from private donors while the corresponding figures for the DUP were £2,000.

The Ulster Unionists, Traditional Unionist Voice and the SDLP, according to the Electoral Commission, received no money from any private donations in that period.

The left-wing People Before Profit party, however, received private donations of £5,250.

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Overall the nine parties listed on the commission’s latest report were given £130,757 from private donors in the last quarter of 2021.

The taxpayer, meanwhile, provided £283,421 for the upkeep of the parties, although the Conservatives received no public money as the party is not represented in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The Electoral Commission confirmed yesterday that political parties in Northern Ireland can only accept a donation from a permissible UK or Irish source.

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission said: “Political parties in Northern Ireland are required to check that any donations received come from one of these permissible sources.

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“The Transparency of Donations and Loans etc. (Northern Ireland Political Parties) Order 2018 has allowed the commission to publish information about donations and loans in Northern Ireland from July 1 2017. Prior to this we were prohibited by law from publishing any information reported to us by political parties. However the rules on permissibility have applied from 2006.”

But Friends of the Earth, which has been campaigning for more than a decade for greater transparency of party funding, said foreign money could still be leaking into the political system, including from the Republic.

James Orr, director of Friends of the Earth (FOE) in Northern Ireland, said: “The current geo-political crisis at the minute makes it imperative that the system of funding parties should be far more transparent and the light can be shone on any potentially dark money.

“The Electoral Commission might publish how much money each party receives but we still don’t know who exactly is funding them here.

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“On top of this we have a situation where the parties only have to declare donations of £7,500 upwards which means if you donated £7,499 it would not be reported. Given the anonymity about donors in Northern Ireland it means there is very little over who is financing the parties.”

Mr Orr added that on FOE’s calculations based on previous reports the local parties between them raised almost £4 million from private donors.

Since 2000 in Britain all major donations to political parties have been public, and it wasn’t until 18 years later that parties in Northern Ireland had to disclose the amount of money they received from private individuals, companies or trade unions.

However, Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK where the names of private donors remain secret.

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The secrecy around donations to political parties in the Province is a throwback to the Troubles when private individuals who gave financial support to a party were in danger of becoming targets of republican or loyalist paramilitaries.

Between 2012 and 2018 figures released by the US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) revealed that Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland received more than $180,000 or around £138,000 from its North American fund raising group, Friends of Sinn Fein.

Sinn Fein at the time sought to defend the funding by claiming the American largesse did not represent donations but were gifts of less than £500 and that the party was fully compliant with the rules on political donations and funding.