Professor Niamh Hardiman:

We have a fully functional, fully constitutional and fully democratic political system with a Constitution that says that the Executive is accountable to the Legislature so in formal and constitutional terms, we are right up there. There is nothing wrong with our formal democratic structures. I am talking about giving them effect. We have a very typical Westminster-type parliamentary system. As the Government is fully formed from the Legislature, it means that the practice of party discipline to control majorities in the Legislature means preferential access to use of power and the power to get legislation through and to curtail debate if the Government wants to do so.

This is built into Westminster systems; it is how they work, and we are very like the British Parliament in this regard.

The British Parliament has changed in some of its practices. In Ireland, we have been developing parliamentary committees since the 1980s, but Britain has gone further. House of Commons committees are, frankly, scary for those who must appear before them. Their reports are debated in Parliament and get a lot of public attention. I would like to see a situation where Oireachtas reports, and there are many excellent reports, really feature as an agenda item in public debates and where the substance of policy and learning which happens through having vigorous debates in the Oireachtas would push issues through to a legislative agenda, and certainly help create the type of environment and expectations I have been speaking about with regard to a normative reappraisal of how we do business. Often when we do business as usual it is hard to see outside the parameters.