Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

I wish to make clear before making further observations that we are no more discussing personalities than we were with the discussion on the deputy chairperson. We are discussing the office and the role it plays, which is well fulfilled by the individual in it at present. A point could be made, and perhaps this is truer of those of us relatively new to House than those who have been Members for a long time, that the Clerk of the Seanad knows many matters most of us might not always know.

We are discussing the Civil Service back-up to the commission. The majority of commission members are Members of the Oireachtas. I fully accept the argument in the speech of the Minister of State that the Clerk of the Dáil serves a dual function and his or her importance is key. At the same time, will there not be a Civil Service back-up to the commission in a deputy capacity in the form of someone familiar with the Seanad? It appears to be a serious gap that the Clerk of the Seanad was not included, fully accepting the point, if one wishes to make it – and I paraphrase, probably unfairly, something the Minister of State said on Second Stage – that the Clerk of the Dáil is roughly twice as important as the Clerk of the Seanad. Be that as it may, the question is if there should be an input from someone at a senior level sitting in on the meetings of the commission who would have a long familiarity with the workings of the Seanad and experience at a different end from that of elected Senators. It seems to me that the case is pretty unarguable that it should be so.

Naturally, as a Senator on the Government side, I must support the Government, what is put before us and what the Minister of State says. We all get into positions where that is the case. I have never even known a Taoiseach who supported party policy 100%.

There is a gap here and I ask the Minister of State to look at it overnight. The commission will be lopsided if it only has the Clerk of the Dáil in attendance and not the Clerk of the Seanad. This is the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission Bill and there are two Houses of the Oireachtas, not one and a half or one and a quarter. This is like the arguments about the European Union. In one sense Ireland has equal status to Germany and in another it does not. The same is true of the Dáil and the Seanad. This case should be seriously examined before the Bill is passed.