Sir, - I would agree with Maire Geoghegan-Quinn (Opinion, February 6th) that the present method of funding political parties is a serious problem. I have never understood how corporate donations can be justified. Either the donors receive some value from their gifts - in which case they constitute bribes of a sort - or they don't receive any value, in which case they have wasted shareholders' funds and the contributions must be ultra vires.
Large personal contributions are equally suspect. As Ms Geoghehan-Quinn points out, all that may explicitly be bought is access, but both parties know that unless this access proves beneficial to the donor he is unlikely to buy it next time around. Clearly, corporate contributions must be prohibited and personal contributions at least limited to an amount which the average person could consider giving. Political parties would then have only a fraction of the funding they presently enjoy. It does not follow that Exchequer funding would be required to make up the difference: we would all benefit if our political parties had far less to spend. At present they sell us their candidates in much the same way that we are sold breakfast cereal (with, perhaps, the one difference that with breakfast cereals there is always at least something in the package).
Surely it is not beyond us to devise a system that, using broadcasting and the press, would permit the parties and candidates to put their policies and ideas before us fairly, but without further encouraging the "marketing" of politics. - Yours, etc., William Hunt,
Harold's Cross, Dublin 6W.