Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I asked the Taoiseach a number of questions on the referendum to abolish the Seanad. I believe he answered two of them but did not answer the other two and I ask him to look at that again. I asked if the date had been decided and obviously he has said that no date is yet decided. Question No. 8 asked the Taoiseach if his Department has a special unit in place to prepare for the referendum to abolish Seanad Éireann and if he will make a statement on the matter. I believe he said he had one person in a unit, which is fair enough. Question No. 9 asked the Taoiseach if he will circulate his Department's memorandums and minutes of meetings held regarding the forthcoming Seanad referendum and if he will make a statement on the matter. There was no response in the answer the Taoiseach gave. That is a legitimate question of which I gave due notice. It was tabled some time ago and it is not good enough to have no reference to it in the answer.

Question No. 10 asked the Taoiseach if his Department officials have given him any assessment they have made on the proposal to abolish Seanad Éireann and if he will make a statement on the matter. I do not believe the Taoiseach referred to that either. Does such an assessment by the officials exist? Some months ago the Taoiseach indicated to me that enormous preparatory work was being done on this issue. He declined to share that work with me and other Members of the House. I asked him to do it and he just smiled and ignored my question.

The Taoiseach has said he is going to have a chat with us about Dáil reform at the end of the month. He had his chance to have real engagement on these issues with other Members of the House and he chose not to take it. He simply chooses to ignore Opposition politicians on this proposal. While that is his entitlement, he should not come in here now and say he is going to have a chat about how the House will change its ways when he is the main architect of running the House into the ground and leaving us with a Dáil that is more unaccountable now than it ever was. This proposal that will ultimately go before the people will essentially give extraordinary powers to the Government, which has a huge majority over all areas of public policy. What is required is radical reform of the electoral politics of the Dáil itself and not just the Seanad. Having just one system will reduce scrutiny of legislation and will lead to an increased concentration of power in the hands of a few as opposed to having a broader spectrum of opinion.

On the date for a referendum, the referendum commission was scathing of the Government's performance over the Oireachtas inquiries referendum on which it claimed that the time allotted to the commission was "grossly inadequate" to use its term. We know the debacle in which the Government ended up in the children's rights referendum which is still in the courts because of the mishandling of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Fitzgerald, when the Government went off and unnecessarily circulated its own propaganda on the referendum and did not allow the referendum commission to do it on its own as it is the independent body.

In that context, the recommendation is that a minimum of three months would be provided for the commission to inform the public on the referendum proposal. The Taoiseach has said that no date has been provided. It would make sense that the Taoiseach should indicate as early as possible - there should be no major mystery to this - the date of the referendum. Furthermore, I ask the Taoiseach that from now he gives a minimum of five months. There is no hurry here. We have until the end of this Dáil term because the Taoiseach has said repeatedly that if the public votes for its abolition, the Seanad will not fall immediately but will continue until the next general election in, I believe, 2016, so there is no need to rush this through the House. Politically, August is a dead month in terms of the public engaging with the issues - not all issues, obviously, but in terms of the conduct of a referendum.

We need a meaningful response to the referendum commission's scathing criticisms of the Government's handling of previous referendums. Given that there are 40 changes to the Constitution consequent on the abolition of the Seanad, we need to give the public enough time to digest the impact of the change and to have sufficient public debate. There is no time imperative that demands that the Government rams this through for its own political agenda.

The Taoiseach said that the abolition of the Seanad would save €20 million. This has been refuted by the Clerk of the Dáil. He has confirmed that gross savings would be less than €10 million a year. If we add on the real savings after tax, it would be only €6 million to €7 million in savings, which represents less than 1% of the cost of Dublin City Council. We need less of this propaganda and more accurate statements from the Taoiseach about what the abolition of the Seanad would entail in terms of costs and so forth. How much time is the Taoiseach prepared to give to the referendum commission in advance of polling date?

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