Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am in favour of the abolition of the Seanad because it is unrepresentative. However, does the Taoiseach not think the enhanced committee system, about which he talks, could replicate the problems we have with the Seanad? I would welcome greater involvement of different sectors of civic society in the committees but there is nothing to stop the same sort of favouritism of the Government appointing its favourite people, its cronies and so on to an enhanced committee system and, essentially, replicating the same elitism and unrepresentative character at committees.

We need representatives of civic society who are genuinely representative of all sectors of society, unlike Members of the current Seanad, who are directly elected from those different sectors, probably starting at a local level as they would come from voluntary and community organisations and genuinely representative organisations and not just professionals, officials, full-timers and so on. We should build a sort of citizens direct democracy from the base up, which would have some influence and some teeth in regard to oversight of the way this House operates and the way democracy generally operates.

From what the Taoiseach is saying, there is a real danger that the Government of the day will end up putting its favourites onto the committees, but that does not resolve the problem we are trying to resolve by doing away with an institution which we have already accepted is not representative and has not really functioned in the way it should. What does the Taoiseach say to some sort of citizens assembly structure, directly elected at a local level, and then maybe building up from there?

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