Irish political finance exists in two parallel universes, one for elections and one for day-to-day activities. Ireland’s election finance rules focus on candidate spending. Candidates are treated equally and regarded as belonging to civil society. Ireland’s parties are treated as public utilities. They are overwhelmingly publicly funded for their non-electoral activities. Funding is allocated proportionally, not equally, and is provided on the basis that parties submit to a plethora of bans, limits, and disclosures. They are parallel universes because parties are not allowed to use their generous public funding in election and referendum campaigns: this is important because in a scenario where public funding could be spent on campaigns, incumbents would have a much greater financial advantage. In the UK state subsidies are so miserly that public funding is a footnote, not a parallel universe. In other countries, like Finland, public funding can be spent on campaigns: there is only one political finance universe. The parallel-universe argument is a more useful description of Ireland’s political finance regime than any of the existing classifications from the small political finance literature.