Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill and I compliment Deputy Mathews on bringing it forward. This is essentially about political reform. It is important that we are having a debate about political reform, although it is also somewhat ironic. One of the big trophies this Government has claimed in respect of political reform is that it brought in the Friday morning sitting to enable Opposition and backbench Deputies to put forward legislation for consideration by the Government. In the four years this Government has been in power, has one piece of this legislation been enacted? No. We all know what this Friday sitting is about. It is about window-dressing. Its purpose is to enable the Taoiseach to say, "We sat X more hours in the week". If the Government was serious about reform, and had given Opposition Deputies and its own backbench Deputies a proper say, it would be looking at implementing some of the legislation. The Government often says it will not oppose such legislation, but it certainly never implements it. What continues to happen here, as in the past - it is not just this Government - is that the Executive is dominating the Dáil. The Members of the Dáil, whether backbench or Opposition Deputies, are not getting an opportunity for a meaningful and contributory role in the Dáil.

We discussed the issue of guillotines, a mechanism the Government was so fond of using until it got caught on the hop in the run-up to last Christmas, when it guillotined that important legislation, the water Bill. It was only then, when it became widely known in public circles how the Government chose to guillotine the establishment of Irish Water, such an important piece of infrastructure, in the space of three hours, that things changed. I acknowledge that the use of guillotines has diminished since then.

When the Government came to power, it was all about political reform and it was going to end cronyism. We know since they have come to power the two-to-one ratio in State appointments has been two for Fine Gael, one for Labour. Where is the democratic revolution there? It is not there. Nowhere was this skulduggery and stroke politics more acutely witnessed than in the appointment of Councillor McNulty to fill the Seanad vacancy. We saw the true calibre of the democratic revolution and the true character of the fraud that is the Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, when he made that political move. In respect of party funding, if the Taoiseach and the Executive were honest about political reform, when Deputies leave one party to join another party or the Independent benches, their allowances should move with them. Instead, this Government, despite having lost a number of Deputies, both Fine Gael and Labour, has held on to the allowances attributable to them.

Gender quotas were mentioned by the Minister of State earlier, in relation to how the Government is embracing and welcoming women into the Parliament. If it really wanted to welcome women into the Parliament, it is not about merely implementing gender quotas, it is about reforming how this Parliament works. It is about reforming the sitting times. If Government was really interested in promoting women, the Taoiseach should have used the opportunity he had in the promotion of Ministers of State at the last Cabinet reshuffle. He could have given women more say at the highest level of Government.

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