Robert Dowds (Dublin Mid West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It was an honour for me to be a member of the Constitutional Convention, as was the Acting Chairman. It was very good that this initiative was agreed and followed through. In the first instance it was a Labour Party initiative to have a constitutional convention. While there were many shortcomings in terms of how it was run and so on, there were many positives too, especially the recommendations which led to the marriage equality referendum. I pay particular credit to Deputy Eamon Gilmore for his work on that. There were certainly shortcomings. For example, it was a waste of time to spend a weekend discussing the length of time that the President should serve. It would have been better if more time had been spent discussing the issue of Dáil reform.

My time is limited and I may come back to some other points. I welcome the announcement by the Chief Whip in respect of the election of the Ceann Comhairle by secret ballot and the other two reforms to which he referred. These are good developments. I am keen to concentrate most of my remarks on the question of Dáil reform. Much of the discussion on this topic at the Constitutional Convention was around the question of our electoral system. I regret the general thrust of the recommendation on that front, because it was largely a rehash of our current system with what I regard as its worst points amplified. For example, many people were in favour of even larger multi-seat constituencies. I regret that the Constitutional Convention did not warm to a system of elections like those in Germany and New Zealand, where there is a split system involving single-seat constituencies that elect half the members, while the other half come from a party list. That would be a better system. It can be done to give parties approximately the right percentage of seats according to their percentage of the vote. Clearly that would be fair and such a system would have numerous advantages. Our system with multi-seat constituencies, whether at national or local level, leads to considerable duplication. For example, the four Deputies from a given constituency could pursue the same issue. We should consider this in respect of the cost of parliamentary questions and so on. If we had a situation where a constituency was represented by one Member, it would help to remove some of that and it would have many other advantages as well. There would be fewer internal party disputes in all political parties in scenarios where Deputies are trying to get the better of a constituency colleague. In many cases that colleague is his greatest rival, more so than a colleague from an opposing party. It is reminiscent of comments supposedly made by Winston Churchill to a new Tory backbencher, although perhaps he made them in a slightly different context. He told the backbencher that his opponents were across the floor but that his enemies were behind him.

I will go on in this vein a little. If we had such a system there would be less of a need for individual parliamentarians to pander to the lowest common denominator in terms of their constituents' needs and they could take a long-term view.

Deputy Murphy has agreed to allow me to go on for two more minutes.

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