Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In fairness, the committees have made a valuable contribution to debate. The Leader has suggested holding committees on one week in the month and this is something we should seriously consider. The best evidence for this was when we sat for three days in the Joint Committee on Health and Children to discuss the A, B and C v. Ireland and the X cases. The reason it got such public interest was that we were not competing for media time with either Seanad or Dáil Éireann. I was amazed at the number of people who tuned into those three days of debate and, in fairness, the three days were used effectively to get information to the public. A lot of information is available at committee meetings but it is not getting out to the public because we are competing for media space with the debates in the Dáil and Seanad at the same time. This is something we should consider when we are looking at the whole structure in future.

In the European Parliament there is one hour in the day for voting between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. and each vote takes 30 seconds. I have made this argument previously. In a short period they can go through anything up to 200 votes. This is something we should consider as part of any reform. It is relevant not only for this issue but for other issues as well with regard to how we can make more use of the time we have. Things are moving a good deal faster now than they did 25, 30 or 40 years ago and we need to move with the times and deal with how we use our time.

One thing we should consider is how we vote because when the bells for voting go every 15 or 20 minutes-----