David Cullinane (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I wish to commend Senator Crown for tabling this Bill which my party will support, despite the fact that we have difficulties with some of its aspects. I understand the constitutional constraints under which the Senator was working in terms of what provisions and changes could be allowed for in the context of tabling such legislation. If I had a blank canvas with which to reform the Seanad I would do so constitutionally. I would have used the opportunity of the Constitutional Convention, which is the best place. It includes citizens who have been appointed and independently selected by the State to examine a range of constitutional reform issues. It is a source of deep regret that the Seanad was not one of those issues.

The previous contributor spoke about a journey, but I am not quite sure what journey we are on. The problem is that the Taoiseach and both parties in power have decided that they want to abolish the Seanad. It looks like they will press ahead with a referendum sometime this year. The simple proposition to the people will be "Yes" or "No" to keep this House as it is.

I do not think there are many in the State who would want to keep this House as it is. Everyone I have spoken to says they are in favour of reforming the Seanad. They want a second Chamber that is more democratic, has more powers, can act to provide greater checks and balances against the Dáil, and can scrutinise EU legislation and any amount of ideas that are out there. However, I have not heard a single person say that they would like this House to be kept as it is. Everybody accepts that there are defects and that it does need to be reformed.

There is a lot of talk about more ideas, reports and publications but we have had any amount of reports on Seanad reform. There have been good reports, good analyses and good discussions. Senator Norris spoke about some contributions he has made and I am sure that over the years many pieces of legislation and reports were brought before this House. The simple reality is, however, that they were all ignored by the political establishment at the time. No party in government has ever dealt with the thorny issue of Seanad reform. They have all abdicated their responsibilities.

The same people who failed to properly reform the Seanad are now saying that we should abolish it. The people who failed in their duties to put forward proper, meaningful and democratic reforms are now saying that the solution is abolition. Abolition is not reform, however. If we abolish this House we will lose 60 Senators in the context of all the other measures the Government is putting in place when it talks about political reform.

We had a discussion recently with the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Hogan, on political reform, which means fewer councillors, councils and TDs together with the abolition of the Seanad. It is all subtraction and there is no real attempt to deal with the profound changes that are necessary in this country.

Even before we looked at the issue of abolishing the Seanad or reducing the number of TDs, the simple reality is that in this State far too much power lies with the Executive. What is the real role of a backbench TD? People may say that Senators do not do a hell of a lot of work and they ask what is the point in having Senators to scrutinise legislation, while others often value the contributions of Senators. We do not do anything differently to TDs when we scrutinise legislation on all Stages. We do not have powers on financial measures that come before us but we can scrutinise legislation as well as TDs do.

The real changes that need to be made, however, are not being made. We need to deal with a democratic deficit in this country. We have had an economic catastrophe with profound social and economic change. We have also had a lack of oversight, scrutiny and regulation in other sectors, including banking. However, the Government does not deal with any of that. There has not been a single piece of legislation brought through the Dáil or the Seanad that deals with banking regulation or changing what happened there. It is zero, zilch yet we will have legislation to abolish this House. The price that is now being put on democracy is to reduce numbers and save money. They say we will save a few bob by abolishing the Seanad and getting rid of councils, councillors and a number of TDs, and then everything will be all right. Of course, everything will not be all right because the fundamental changes which need to be made are not being made.

Senator O'Donnell seems to be very much opposed to the idea of the Irish diaspora voting in elections, given her response to some of the previous contributions. She is entitled to be.