Professor Niamh Hardiman:

There are some indicators of the strength of the executivevis-à-visthe legislature in different countries. Ireland and Britain stand out as having particularly weakly developed powers available to the legislature. This is usually measured in terms of the powers and competences available to parliamentary committees, powers of compellability of witnesses, powers to command papers, but also agenda setting of the work of the parliament itself, the time-tabling within committees, the ability to get amendments accepted inside committees, the degree to which committees work along party political lines, the ending of debate and the guillotining of debates in committees. All those indicators suggest that in Ireland and Britain the parliamentary committees have a weaker scope of powers available to them. Many continental European countries have stronger powers. The strongest of all are in Scandinavian countries, it seems, and in the Netherlands where committees have extensive powers to set agendas and so on.

To what degree is this influenced by the electoral system? There is extensive debate about the Irish electoral system and electoral system reform is the first answer whenever anything goes wrong. I am not so convinced. Practices and expectations might not necessarily be changed by having, for example, a list PR system. One of the things that is encouraged in continental European systems by having a list system, is the ability to prioritise getting people elected on account of their policy competence but there is a price to be paid for that and that is that they get onto party lists without necessarily having to have a very close association with their constituency base, with their electorate. I do not have to tell that to people here. You are all elected politicians. You know much better than I do what it takes to get elected.The very strong features of the Irish electoral system are that it enables a strong connection with the local electoral base and to have a strong sense of responsiveness to civil society. These are very important things that I do not think we would want to lose from the current electoral system.