Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

——on the issue and that would have been fair. However, I do not believe this to be a ground for objecting to what is being proposed as I will explain later. It is symptomatic of a long-standing problem within this House, which was a problem when both Fine Gael and the Labour Party were in Government and for as long as Government backbenchers are generally herded into the Chamber as voting fodder. They are neither spoken to nor consulted and it is regrettable that we should be treated as a barely tolerated inconvenience in some of these matters when we invest a lot of our time dealing with these issues and trying our best to make a sensible contribution. I do not believe it is merely a separate issue. I am very pleased to note also that the process of Dáil reform has commenced and I look forward to a time when we as Government backbenchers will have a much greater role to play and be consulted more widely.

The second issue concerns the timescale and the dangers associated with it. In this regard the question is whether on the one hand there is such an urgent need to hold a referendum in seven weeks and, on the other, whether the debate can be sufficiently informed in that short time. Seven weeks to a constitutional referendum is indicative of urgency.

Everybody has been aware of this problem for a considerable time, at the very least since January 2004 when the decision was made in the Supreme Court in the L and O case.The question must be asked whether there is an urgency now and, if so, why the referendum was only announced before Easter.

See this speech in context