How a watchdog struggled to bite or bark
Over the last two decades, the Standards in Public Office Commission has struggled to police several cumbersome laws which it has implored successive administrations to change – requests which have been emphatically ignored
Towards the end of the last century, a series of political corruption scandals evoked the prescient remarks of Fianna Fáil’s George Colley in 1967 about “low standards in high places” in Irish public life. The state appeared ill-equipped to deal with revelations of some politicians evading tax and taking corrupt payments.
So the Fianna Fáil government set up Sipo, the Standards in Public Office Commission. It would be the state’s ethics in public ...
