Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Yes. But it's not with regard to a particular committee, Senator. It is my conviction that the network of committees that we have established are too onerous for a small House to bear. I'm not talking about the quality or the membership of a particular committee, but if you have 650 members in a parliament, as does the neighbouring Parliament, it tends to develop specialisation. It tends to bring people through as chairman of the foreign affairs committee, who is expert on foreign affairs, who has no expectation of being a Minister or who doesn't want to become a Minister, or whatever. In our circumstances, in a very small House, if you strip out 30 Ministers and 30 Opposition Deputies to shadow them, it's a very small House. I mean, our system is impeccably democratic. Nobody can say that there's a point of view in the country that isn't represented here. Some of them are strangers to legislating but they perform other very important roles. And I think if you have too many committees or if you have circumstances where, for example, somebody has to rush down to room No. 3 to get in three or four people to vote here, or people has to run off ... have to run off from this committee to another committee because there's a more important issue, their membership of ... they've dual membership of two committees, I don't think ... I don't think that that can work. I mean, Deputies, virtually all Deputies, there was one or two Deputies behind me earlier on that this doesn't apply to, but pretty much all Deputies have an extraordinary constituency workload. And they have to do that as well. And I think we need to be careful in a small House that we don't grow too many committees.