Monaghan County Council has passed a motion calling for legislation to be introduced to allow SIPO to penalise office holders found to be in breach of regulations.
It comes on the back of a report which found Councillor Seamus Treanor breached standards in public office in his canvassing leaflet in the run up to the local elections in 2019.
The leaflet, which contained claims about asylum seekers and EU migrants, was found to be "factually incorrect and misleading".
The report was considered at a council meeting this morning.
Councillor Treanor claimed SIPO was "set up to root out corruption and has no role in censoring politicians".
The SIPO report found that the "councillors constitutional right to express freely their convictions and opinions cannot be presumed to extend to the freedom to publicise inaccurate statements".
Sinn Féin's Brian McKenna passed a motion calling on the Minister for Local Government to allow SIPO to impose penalties for such breaches.
He also asked the Chamber if this was an instance of "politicians protecting politicians" because they "pretend that they are doing something about ethics in public office but there are no penalties included in the act".
Advertisement
