Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

There is an incremental approach to bringing forth Standing Orders as drafted. I, too, pay tribute to the people who make a complex issue appear easier to deal with than it is, in particular Noreen Banim who is one of the people who worked behind the scenes on the set of Standing Orders with which we are dealing today.

The business committee will be up and running fairly soon. I believe this committee will be pivotal in reflecting the change of power in terms of that power being shared among Parliament as opposed to residing with the Government, with the Opposition having only influence in particular matters. There is a big difference between influence and power. It is in this regard we will see reform manifest itself. To allow this to play out all of the committees will need to be up and running. There is a real problem in terms of the size of this Dáil, which is almost a converse of the previous Dáil which comprised a large Government and a small Opposition. The reverse is now the case. This means it will be difficult for the Government to fill all of the positions on committees. We may well end up with a situation whereby members of the Opposition who want to be members of particular committees will be unable to be so.

We have to find a way to reduce the amount of negative energy that might create.

When writing Standing Orders we have to ask ourselves where we get our authority from. We get it from the people and the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution do the words "political party" appear. I have spoken on numerous occasions over the past five years on this point. Despite now being in a party, I have not changed my view. The mandate is given to the individual who stands for election. Sometimes the person stands within a political party system, sometimes as an Independent. The people decide who should fill the seats in this Chamber. The Standing Orders as they are written favour the party as having a preferred mandate. That is wrong. It will add another layer, if not two, of co-ordination that will make it very difficult to run this House. Some of the offices of the House are finding that there is additional work they had not anticipated in the temporary mechanism for co-ordination. Co-ordination in the first instance will be within the groups. Then there will be co-ordination between the groups and between the groups and the Government. That will make running this House much more difficult. The way it has been designed, favouring the parties over big groups, means that, instead of big groups coming together and co-ordinating, there will be a more fragmented arrangement with many small groups, making that much more difficult. I had some experience of that having been the Whip for the Technical Group, which worked pretty well in the last Dáil. There were 17 or 18 Members in it and no one missed Private Member's business or Leaders' Questions while Priority Questions were routinely taken. Members also sat on committees. The way it is being done here creates unnecessary fragmentation.

I take Deputy Paul Murphy’s point about the reforms. They are reforms of the way we run this House but there are political reforms that need to be considered, for example, the Social Democrats put forward the idea of an anti-corruption agency, instead of having tribunals and commissions of investigation after the fact. There is a better way to do it and that is one of our suggestions. It is an example of what could be done if political reform was captured, as opposed to just Dáil reform, which is welcome but is only half way towards what is needed.

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