Liam Twomey (Fine Gael)

It is indicative of the reasons the House is held in such disrepute when the leaders of the groups are not aware the House is not sitting next week, even though it has been announced that this is the case. It was a little premature. In the course of this debate I have a certain amount of sympathy for the Leader because he has been manipulated by the Government into allowing the Seanad to be neutralised over time. The fact that his party has been in power continuously in the Seanad for almost 20 years, during which time no reforms of any meaning to the people have been introduced, is an indication of what has gone wrong. There is a sense that people want to shoot the messenger who has brought forward this debate in a way that has galvanised Members of this House with the idea that they might actually be out of a job in a number of years. As a result, we might see some meaningful reforms in the lifetime of this Government. Comments have been made about democracy and the role of democracy. It is the failure of democratic political systems and the political representatives elected by the people to connect with citizens that leads to dictatorship, not whether there might be 120 or 220 Members. There is a huge sense among the public that we are not connected to the people we represent. For that reason, we urgently need to reform both Houses of the Oireachtas.