Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Before the Deputy who spoke before me leaves the House, I wish to refer to the university Senators. Before independence and up to 1937, there were Teachtaí Dála and MPs. It was something we inherited from the British. They were elected to the House of Commons when the Dáil was set up in 1919. There were Senators from the National University of Ireland, NUI, and from Trinity College. That continued until 1937 when, rightly in my view because they do not have any place in this Chamber, it was decided that no longer would university representatives elected by graduates sit in the Dáil.

One might ask why they did not abolish those seats. The logic of the situation is that we are talking about the late 1930s when it would be easy for people in the minority community in the South and people in the majority community in the North to say that the simple abolition of those seats effectively was taking seats from the Unionist minority, who in many cases also happened to be a religious minority in the State at the time.

In terms of the reluctance in more recent years to effect change once we got a referendum, on many occasions I argued that we should grasp the nettle and at least open the franchise, as is now possible, to all university graduates. There was a certain reluctance, in the context of the peace process, to be seen to do anything that was not favourable to Trinity, but I agree with the Deputy that it is time for change.

When people laugh at what was done in the past, it is important that they first examine the historical record and the rather unusual circumstances in which this arose in the first place, which was because they were sitting in this Dáil up to 1937.

This proposal and the way it has been put forward has all the hallmarks of a rush of blood to the head. It is bad enough to have one rush of blood to the head, but to have two in a row seems to be a mistake. The first rush of blood to the head was the announcement by the Taoiseach at a dinner that he would abolish the Seanad. The second was to come forward with this proposal without thinking out the complexities involved and the possible unintended consequences.

The Taoiseach is the longest serving Member in this House. I would have thought he would have realised that when legislation that involves such monumental change is rushed, before having endless debate about it, it is likely he will not wind up with the result he is looking for. It is a pity we did not have a discussion about this, particularly in the Constitutional Convention that is looking at the electoral system.

An interesting debate is going on in the House and Government Members have been frank in their views, which are varied and interesting, but when we look at the totality of the debate, we must ask if we are going anywhere in a coherent fashion and whether we have examined the consequences of anything. I was interested in Deputy Olivia Mitchell's remarks about this place being family unfriendly. We are now proposing four day sittings. She, as a Dublin Deputy, complained about sittings that last until midnight. If there are four day sittings, many Deputies will leave their houses on a Monday morning and return home on a Friday evening, and many of them from the furthest parts of the country will not get home in the meantime. For any family person, that is in no way a family-friendly situation.

It is easy for conventions to make proposals and there have been suggestions of making Dáil constituencies even bigger. It takes longer to drive from one end of my constituency to the other than it does to drive from the edge of the constituency to Dublin. We also know that the more seats there are in a constituency, the more chances there will be more than one person elected from the party in that constituency and a greater possibility of being taken out by another party member if we do not keep watching everything on the ground. The bigger the constituencies and the bigger the numbers, the more people will be tied to constituency work day in, day out.

There are many issues to be debated. One issue I do not hear debated is the role of Parliament. Cén fáth go bhfuil an tOireachtas ann? What are we doing here? The Oireachtas is a forum for public debate where issues of concern to ordinary citizens are raised and debated. I also think we carry out a specialist function. We are meant to be the people who scrutinise legislation. No legislation is meant to be passed into law without a detailed analysis by us of every word in the legislation. This is where the media representation of what happens here is at variance with the reality. The media will highlight the row every day, so if the Chamber is full and there is a heated argument, the media will highlight that. If, however, we are in a committee teasing out legislation in a reflective and co-operative fashion, Government and Opposition, if we are doing that tedious work of improving every section of that Bill, the media does not highlight that. Why would they when it is boring? It is important, however, that we understand that just because something is mundane or appears boring, that does not mean it is not important.

I pay tribute to the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine for the way he handled the Animal Health and Welfare Bill. He did not take a view that he had the majority, which he clearly did, and he accepted amendment after amendment to the Bill. He listened to the arguments and if he could not accept the amendment but thought there was some substance to it, he came back on Report Stage with an amendment that took on board the principle. If we want reform in this House, the most fundamental reform we could all introduce would be the idea that we could accept arguments of the Opposition when they are valid and explain any reasons an amendment cannot be accepted.

Time and again when we do not scrutinise the legislation properly and when a case is thrown out by the courts because someone has found a loophole we did not find when going through the Houses, everyone then jumps up and down and asks why we did not do our job and see the flaw in the legislation. A law was passed that a driver must keep a warning triangle in the cab of a truck at all times. There was an accident when the truck was parked and a person ran into it. The lorry driver was prosecuted on the basis that he was not displaying the triangle behind the truck to warn the oncoming car of the danger. The barrister noticed the law said the triangle had to be in the cab of the truck at all times and he made the logical argument that he could not take the triangle out of the cab and put it behind the lorry because he would be breaking law because he no longer had a triangle in the cab.

I think of all the famous cases involving the drink driving laws, where people drove a coach and four through that sort of minor error. Last year, when we debated the Water Services Bill, there was a proposal that if a person was prosecuted, his name would be made public. I remember raising the issue with the Minister, and he accepted that only if there was a conviction should a person's name become public, and if that person was prosecuted and found innocent, his name should not be publicised. That is what we are supposed to be doing. It is boring and mundane but at the end of the day, it is only when things go wrong in the courts that we realise the importance of the work we do.

If I apply to a Department for a grant, in most cases I am offered an appeal. If I am still unhappy I can go to the Ombudsman. We accept the idea of three different people looking at the same proposition under the same law and rules to see if the adjudication is right or if errors have been made. Peer review has become prevalent when looking at the work of experts.

We are saying here, however, that one review of legislation that is much more complex and with many sections, will be sufficient.

The role of the Seanad is not to veto legislation. The role of the Seanad is to be part of the iterative process, which should be an interactive process with Ministers to tease out the legislation and, by persuasion, to make amendments. It is significant that, for one reason or another, during the term of this Oireachtas - we count it by Dáileanna even though it is the Oireachtas - 529 amendments have been made in the Seanad. Whereas the popular approach is all about the votes and the big head-on debates, in fact, much of the best work of this is done by persuasion.

Unfortunately, the next issue to which we should address our minds in abolishing the Seanad with the Dáil operating as it does is that 57% of legislation introduced into this House is guillotined. I am not normally overly upset about guillotines on Second Stage, but I have an aversion to them on Committee or Report Stage. I am not saying that there is never a rule for a guillotine because we can need emergency legislation in this House, but if one was even considering getting rid of the second House, one would need to change the Constitution in order that no legislation could be guillotined on Committee or Report Stage in this House without two thirds of the Dáil agreeing. My purpose for that is that it would force all of us to ensure the proper scrutiny of legislation. I am sure in his time as a Minister, Deputy Varadkar, like me, always found that when he examined the legislation, unless it was a two-line Bill, there were issues he needed to amend, of which some could be as small as a comma but others which could be much more substantial than that.

The Taoiseach has mentioned a fifth Stage and I would be interested to see that fleshed out. If the Government is to continue to succumb to the temptation - there is no legal or constitutional barrier to doing so - of guillotining Committee and Report Stages, I cannot really see what a fifth Stage will add in the House, and having gone through the Bill I am not sure how the same persons going through the same Bill again would bring the same thing to the Bill that a different set of eyes looking at the Bill would bring to it. It is important that we would persuade the Taoiseach, even if he really believes the Seanad should be abolished, to hold back on that until we have had a proper debate about all the unintended consequences that might arise.

There is another issue. It is a mundane and practical issue, but it is an issue none the less. In the new Dáil, there will be 158 Deputies. Out of those, we will take the Ceann Comhairle and all the Ministers and Ministers of State, and the fact that at times there might be Deputies who for good reasons cannot fully attend to parliamentary duties, and I am left with approximately 120 Deputies available for ordinary committee work. As somebody who has been very involved in committees where we have been non-partisan since this Dáil came together, I must say that fantastic work goes on in committees. Under the chairmanship of Deputy Andrew Doyle, the Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine produced a considerable report on the oil and gas sector, and we got cohesion between all the political parties and the Independents on that report on a matter on which there would never be a meeting of minds. Recently, we have been doing detailed work on the issue of the dominance of the supermarkets in farm prices and how to address that imbalance which is also a big ticket item on the European agenda. Obviously, we have debated the Common Agricultural Policy. We have debated many different matters and each committee is doing this. The pool of available members is approximately 180 when one throws in the Seanad. There are 20 committees, excluding sub-committees, which most committees have, and select committees. The committee of which I am a member meets for two or three hours every Tuesday and often meets on a Thursday as well, either in plenary or sub-committee form. If everybody is on one committee and I reduce the number available from the current 180 to 120, I am left with six members for each committee.

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