Mr. John McCallister:

I do not see any down sides because the provisions for weighted majority and secret ballot mean nobody could game the election. The Chairman has been in a political party for a reasonable number of years, and he knows that trying to tell all of his colleagues they need to vote for something in a secret ballot is very difficult to organise or arrange. I feel strongly the speakership should be a gift of the Members of the Assembly and not of the Executive arm of government or the result of a deal between the two main parties in the Executive arm of government. Having a speaker who is truly independent would change the dynamic of building a parliamentary culture.

We have been fortunate that in my time we have had two good speakers in Mr. William Hay and Mr. Mitchel McLaughlin, and there has been no question about impartiality. In his letter, the current speaker, Mr. Mitchel McLaughlin, speaks about the difficulties of being a constituency Member and the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Speaker cannot get involved in constituency planning issues. As one newspaper I read put it, under the House of Commons model if Buckinghamshire was being tarmaced the Speaker could not do much about it as a constituency MP. This becomes a problem because 70,000 electors in Buckinghamshire are disenfranchised.

What I like about the system here is that the constituency is reduced by a seat. Taking our previous two speakers, Mr. Willie Hay was the only Unionist representative in the Foyle constituency and Mr. Mitchel McLaughlin is the only Nationalist representative in South Antrim. I like the idea of lifting them out of the constituency and letting the parties in those two cases, Sinn Féin and the DUP, replace them. It would not upset the constituency balance. I suggest this is a more mature democracy and is at the point that it can do so. We are not at that point. This is why I would lift the Speaker entirely out of constituency politics. A secret ballot provides the protection that the election cannot be gamed because Members will have to vote on merit as to who they think are the best people. The weighted majority means it would be very difficult, and I would say impossible, for one party to dominate or game the election.