Professor Niamh Hardiman:

On the electoral system, I am not saying it is not worth looking at other electoral systems. I am not so completely wedded to PR-STV that I would say it is the best of all possible systems we could ever have. I am just saying it is not necessarily the source of all the problems people attribute to it. When we think about access we think about a number of different things. The access of individual citizens to their representative is one thing and the access of powerful interests to the wider policy-shaping agenda is something different. In Irish politics people value the fact they can get to see their representative easily, but there is a downside to this. Who am I to say, because the members know this better than I do, but my understanding is very often what people want is help with negotiating a bureaucracy which can seem very unresponsive, help with finding out rights and entitlements they have and should be able to access easily but somehow cannot, or help with problems for which a policy solution may be available to them of which they are not aware. Helping people to negotiate a system which is a bit opaque suggests not only there is a good connection between people and their representatives, but also there are things we need to look at again regarding the opacity or difficulty of negotiating our wider public services.