Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour)

I thank my Labour Party colleague, Deputy Howlin, for bringing a timely and important motion before the House. It is quite a lengthy motion and if I read it into the record this evening, I doubt I would have any speaking time left. It is quite a substantial motion.

While it is a lengthy motion, it is not complex. It lists a series of measures that should have been taken in recent decades. We should not be at this bottleneck this evening where we find that a plethora of reforms and a series of measures that should have been put in place are still absent from this House.

One could say that many of the measures in the proposal Deputy Howlin has brought before the House are quite simple and a great number of them are attainable in the here and now. They do not need major legislative changes. They do not require constitutional amendments. The Order of Business and the way this House operates on a day-to-day basis could well accommodate the changes in Deputy Howlin's proposal. Many of these changes could be put into immediate effect and there is no excuse to hide behind legislative measures or constitutional issues in that many of the changes that can be made are within the control of this House right now.

There are two approaches to reform: the big bang approach and the incremental approach. I favour the incremental approach to matters. However, we have arrived at a situation where we need a big bang approach because this House has become so stagnant because of the type of governance that Fianna Fáil and its culture of politics has ingrained into this House.

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