INSIDE POLITICS: While the TD's actions look far from honourable, she was playing with rules that had been left in place
POLITICIANS ARE a strange breed, often. Volunteers must be driven, egotistical and selfish, for the most part, to have a chance of success. They usually also tend to be self-obsessed, but lacking in self-awareness - and frequently can be uncomprehending of the impact their actions have on others. If there any doubt, just look at Fianna Fáil's Beverley Flynn.
This week, she blundered through the political minefield created by the revelation that she was still taking a €40,000-a-year tax-free allowance for Independent TDs, even though she had rejoined FF.
Back in Mayo, Flynn, infused with the born-to-rule creed and self-belief of her father, Pádraig, is licking her wounds, feeling hard done by and telling friends she cannot understand why trouble keeps following her around.
Before, dear reader, you choke on your cornflakes, let me warn you that she has a point: Beverley Flynn did not break the allowances rules. They were deliberately constructed.
For 70 years, each TD has qualified for an allowance to cover research staff and other costs associated with running a party, but not to pay for election campaigns. For party TDs, the money goes directly into central coffers and the TDs never see it. For Independents, it goes directly to them. In 2001, Charlie McCreevy increased it. He and other politicians teased through what should happen if a politician quit or joined a party during a Dáil term; and McCreevy decided, quite deliberately, that the money should stay where it started out.
"The electorate had provided votes which elected a member on the basis of the badge he wore at a general or byelection and they were entitled to expect their party to enjoy that deputy's support in the voting lobbies and financially," McCreevy said at the time.
Labour's Ruairí Quinn, after much thought, decided similarly in 1996 when he updated the allowances during his time in the Department of Finance: "Most of us thought that was reasonable," McCreevy said at the time.
And it is. But there are consequences to that being so, and those consequences are not explainable by anyone, least of all by a TD under fire, during a political firestorm like we had this week.
Flynn herself did not get the allowance after she was kicked out of FF in 2004. It stayed with FF. But she did start to get it from 2007, when she was elected under her own steam as an Independent.
Wicklow TD Joe Behan, who quit FF during the over-70s medical card crisis late last year, will not get it for any of the remaining years of this Dáil. The payment due for him will stay with FF.
If a party should not either gain or lose money because a TD joins, or defects, then if follows that payments to Independents must stay with them, regardless of what happens to them during a Dáil term. And this was bound eventually to throw up a Flynn-type case.
Wexford's Liam Twomey, who started out as an Independent, raised the issue with Fine Gael before he joined in 2004. Fine Gael investigated and found the money legally could not be transferred to it. So Twomey "notionally" gave it to FG, who "notionally" gave it back to him.
The money never left Wexford and was spent - unsuccessfully as it turned out - to build up a political operation behind him. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention at the time, but Ireland 2004 was a different land to Ireland 2008.
Back in 2001, Labour's Brendan Ryan (the Cork one) asked McCreevy in the Seanad what would happen to an Independent's allowance if he joined a party. Ryan was elected as an Independent in 1997, but joined Labour in 1999. The finance officials behind McCreevy huddled and came up with different answers. One said it would stay with the Independent. Another thought it would go to the party the Independent joined. There the matter rested.
Ryan forgot all about it, only to find weeks later a cheque in the post from the Department of Finance for €15,000 for the back payments, which he had never claimed. Surprised, Ryan figured out what to do.
In the end, he paid off a €5,000 Labour Party mortgage on a Cork office, funded a €5,000 leaflet drop before the formal opening of an election campaign and sent the rest to the Cork Simon Community, in which he has been long involved.
He wrote about the affair in a Cork Evening Echo column at the time; but, of course, nobody paid a blind bit of attention either. Ryan does not claim to be a saint. Instead, he says he knew what would have happened if he had done anything else.
While Flynn has not broken any law, she has been dishonourable. She has used the Independent allowance in Mayo - and she has used the central party services offered by FF to its TDs. She cannot have it both ways.
And she has ended any hope she had of promotion from Brian Cowen - however unlikely that might have been - in this Dáil term, at any rate. Such an outcome will be a blessed relief to many of her colleagues.
The affair is now going to force the Government to produce legislation. But to do what? Should the money go with the TD in future? If so, it is an encouragement for a lack of discipline, and it will create other anomalies in time.
But one outrageous anomaly could be ended. The money that goes to the parties is subsequently audited, but the money to the Independents is not. Such a task, said McCreevy in 2001, would be "an unreasonable burden". In reality, McCreevy did not want to upset the four Independents then needed by the government: Jackie Healy-Rae, Tom Gildea, Harry Blaney and Mildred Fox.
Such scrutiny would not be welcomed by any other Independent, either.
Tony Gregory, Lord rest his soul, could be brought to the point of irritation in a flash with just a question about the allowance: a valuable war chest that none wants to give up or curtail.