Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister dismissed, as Deputy Catherine Murphy said, a tame amendment. I put down a number of amendments. We are restricted in how we can frame amendments on a constitutional Bill, especially one which had as its target the abolition of the Seanad. One has to work within those confines and I obviously failed in my amendments because they were ruled out. That is not to say that the intent of those amendments was inappropriate and on Committee Stage, with more time, I would have debated them on the relevant sections. I will not go into them here.

The question is to change from 14 to ten Members. We changed the nominating process for Deputies in the past and it was reduced and made much easier so citizens of the State could easily nominate themselves with the support of 30 other constituents from the relevant constituency. That made it easier and some people might say it allowed people in who otherwise would not have stood, and might have confused the issue. That is the nature of democracy. The next Dáil election will have 40 constituencies. If I were to stand in 40 constituencies, which I would be entitled to do, I would need to find 1,200 nominating individuals, 30 in each constituency. That is the type of figure the Government should be discussing as a minimum requirement for a nomination as President. Every citizen should be entitled to contest a presidential election. We probably had a bigger number of candidates in the last presidential election than in many of the previous elections and it was a better election for that. In future we should encourage people because then we might have a debate on the role of the Presidency, as we have had.

The figure of 1,000 I mentioned may be too low and maybe it should be 10,000 but it needs to be something manageable by the ordinary citizen. In the past we excluded the citizen from the nominating process. Nominations had to come from Deputies, Senators or county councillors. There is no nomination process for the mere citizen. There can never be a President under the age of 35 years. Whether one agrees or disagrees with having a young President, there is probably some logic to it, but that is something to be argued in a presidential election, because there are some quite able young people.

We could have debated the effects of what the Government was proposing. While changing the Constitution to give effect to what the Government has proposed in this Bill, there could have been a range of other changes, whether to the nomination process for presidential elections or how the Dáil operated. One of my most significant criticisms of this is that nothing is presented to show how the Dáil will change in the future, whether election to the Dáil, how it operates or how it relates to the Executive. Those are the promises that are being made. We are having a debate here on a single issue out of context because the effect of it is what is in this Bill, each of the changes that are being impacted by the people if they accept the proposition to abolish the Seanad. The Government could have tinkered with and accepted some of the proposals which Deputy Catherine Murphy and a range of people have proposed over the years to try to make the system of Government in this country more democratic, reflective and transparent. These issues were not given to the Constitutional Convention.

The Constitutional Convention was mentioned earlier. We have approached this almost in a backwards fashion because the Constitutional Convention was not allowed to discuss the Seanad abolition and had its discussions around the Dáil electoral system, changes to it and how it works before any discussion of the effects of this proposition if it happens. The dismissive attitude is regrettable. Instead of reducing the required number of nominating Members to 14 it should nearly be abolished and it should not be the preserve of Deputies or county councillors. Why should it be the preserve of elected Members only to nominate Presidential candidates? Why are citizens not allowed to make nominations? In a supposed republic every citizen is supposed to be equal. That provision in the Constitution makes some people more equal than others.

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