Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will support this, not because I think it will lead to much change, but because I will take a very small improvement over no improvement. I am very disappointed that there have been no changes to make the Dáil more family-friendly. This was clearly the time to do that. I will warmly support the pre-legislative changes when they come in next January. That is the real, substantive change that has been proposed. However, none of this will address the real problem - a Dáil that does not legislate. There is no better example of that than this room now.

Let us stop and look at what is happening. This is the 50 minute debate on Dáil reform. We all say we want Dáil reform, we are passionate about it. We work very hard to get in here and when we are here, so we want the Dáil to work. We have 50 minutes to debate Dáil reform, and nobody is here. This should be a vibrant, healthy, robust debate about what all the Members of Dáil Éireann want for us as parliamentarians, but nobody is here because this is not a debate. It is 50 minutes of us standing up, talking for two minutes and then sitting down. We all know, long ahead of time, that not a single letter of the motion will be changed by anything that would be said in the 50 minutes, so Deputies from all sides are absent. That is the problem.

In the first few days of this Dáil, when I was a new Member, I was very taken by Deputy Stagg's statement that this is a House of legislation, we are legislators. I took that to heart and tried to input to legislation, most of the time in a constructive manner, I hope. I examined the number of legislative amendments put by Government Deputies. The House is full of smart, energetic, good, hard-working, brilliant Government Deputies and by and large, with a few exceptions, they do not table amendments because they are not allowed.

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