Professor David Farrell:

It is not completely an outlier. My late father used to talk about how the institutions of Irish Government are more British than the British themselves. In effect, we are the personification of the Westminster democracy. I lived for 20 years in Britain and while there observed their parliamentary democracy modernise while ours stood still. That means what my father said 20 or 30 years ago is even more applicable today than when he was writing. Our parliamentary system has not kept pace with the need for change and in that sense we are moving towards being an outlier. In fairness, we are an example of a Westminster system.

On the scale of things, one has a Westminster democracy system where power lies with the government and the parliament is largely subservient to the government and the other extreme, as members will well know, is the United States of America. What is often missed, as I said earlier, is that within continental Europe and consensus democracies, there is a much closer degree of correspondence between the power of government and the power of parliament. That is where we should be going.