Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I also wish to send best wishes to Teachta Higgins's mother and to the Higgins family. I will give my own take on what politics should be about. It should be about empowering citizens, systems of government should be accountable and transparent. and politicians should be the servants of the people. Consequently, the starting point of this discussion on the reform of the Oireachtas should have been about how our democracy is organised and how our governmental systems are organised. As to how this is done in the context of a post-Good Friday Agreement environment, one must have a notion of an all-Ireland vision about all this, as well as on how we reach out to the diaspora. I am a relative newcomer here and find it highly dysfunctional. I find the institutions to be exclusive and have only to cite the Government Chief Whip, who has acknowledged the Government's record on Dáil reform is deplorable. The guillotine is in free use and all the while it looks as though more power is being given to the Government and yet, in his election promises, the Taoiseach was loud in taking about the people's revolution, the need for root and branch reform and so on.

Then one comes to the issue of the abolition of the Seanad. The Seanad is not representative, is exclusive and is not elected by universal suffrage and so clearly it must go. However, the proposed referendum does not give people the choice of being able to vote for a reformed Seanad. I refer to those who might prefer a bicameral system as opposed to a unicameral system, and while I acknowledge the Taoiseach has been citing unicameral systems in other places, most of them also have strong local government structures, which is not the case here. Consequently, with the deepest respect, I am not at all taken by the idea that the Taoiseach will have a talk with Members before the new system is introduced. There must be a discussion about these matters in which ideas are swapped. I attended the Constitutional Convention and it was desperately frustrating for all the citizen participants present that they could not discuss the abolition of the Seanad. They could not even discuss it because they were not allowed to so do.

There is cynicism abroad within society about politics and politicians for very good reason. However, we still retain the tradition of the meitheal and of cabhair na gcomharsan. There remains a sense of volunteerism and people are highly active within their communities. The Constitutional Convention is evidence of this because every single citizen delegate to whom I spoke was delighted to be there. While those involved would tell one they were not coming down with all sorts of academic qualifications, nevertheless they read themselves into it, took the job seriously, did it and felt privileged and honoured to be a part of it. This shows that were a Government genuinely about root and branch reform, about empowering citizens and about bringing in a genuinely republican form of government in which the people were sovereign, one would get a highly positive response to all this. However, given the manner in which it is being done, the Government is missing a huge opportunity to bring forward real political reform and I think it will leave a mess. I do not say that with any sense of satisfaction.

Does the Taoiseach not agree that a rebalancing of power within the Oireachtas between the Executive and the Legislature is required? Does he not agree that real reform of local government is required, as opposed to what obtains at present? Does he agree that rather than having a centralised core comprising an Executive or a Cabinet holding control, a system in which people genuinely can have a sense of ownership is needed?

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