John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

How does one compete with that? It would have given them expanded access into the halls of Parliament. If we vote for section 1, I am afraid all those opportunities are cut off at the knees and we will not be able to pursue that any further.

Why is this political nirvana so important? I believe the real political problem in the country is the composition of and the electoral system used for the Dáil. I mean absolutely no disrespect to my Dáil colleagues. I have come here as an outsider and still consider myself somewhat of an outsider and not a real politician. My respect for their work and the commitment they show to what is in general an extremely difficult job has increased enormously. I have a professional sense of understanding of the concept many of them have of being continually on call - at the end of a phone for somebody who has a problem in a way that I can relate to in my day job.

However, there is still something very wrong with the way we are doing it because we have a three to five year electoral cycle, depending on political variables, at the end of which we have a large number of simultaneous local elections. The principal skill sets that get one elected, and I say this not in an insulting way, are, first, negotiating the Byzantine ways of the local party structure and getting on the nominating process and, second, being a sound, solid constituency worker. In general, if one sits at home in one's lonely garret on a quiet Thursday night in any rural or urban place in Ireland and thinks about what we need to do to fix the education system, the health system, the welfare system or something we need to do to increase equity in our society, no matter how good the idea it will never be one's highest professional priority as a politician because one's highest priority in our localised system - the word "parochial" is correct and I use it not in any pejorative sense - is how one can impress sufficient numbers of local people that they will return one to Leinster House at the next electoral cycle. It makes it difficult to be the bearer of bad news or the person who, as the political equivalent of Morgan Kelly, could have stood up during the time of the previous Government and said: "Guys, it has never happened in the history of commerce that a bubble of the kind we are experiencing did not stop and in the overwhelming majority of cases, when they blow up that fast they crash disastrously, and they stay crashed." It must be said that not all economists were clever enough to see that coming, but the reality is that there were no PhD economists in the first line either of our Government or our Department of Finance.

The current system in the Dáil is dysfunctional and is resulting in people being elected who have refocused on local rather than national issues. The Minister will be aware that in general in the other House, and even among the Members of this House who may aspire to being a Member in the other House, often one's bitterest political rival and most proximate threat to one's own career advancement in terms of being elected or re-elected is not the person who is one's ideological foe but the person in one's own party who is in the same constituency. There is something fundamentally crazy about that. If our country is to be run by a bunch of people who believe they have a set of ideas to try to fix it, they should at least be able to work in unison and in a way that maximises their collective chance of getting to where they can make the decisions and have the power to do something about it, but instead we have the opposite. We have people who are wondering what part of the constituency so and so from their party is strong in, and what they can do to undermine him or her in the constituency and make themselves stronger there. Again, because of the system we have, we end up with people who are not only not fixated on the national issues but are not particularly incentivised to be fixated on thought and thinking things through. It is a much more visceral reaction.

Into this heady mix of dysfunction we throw the rather strange structure of our two major political parties who, in truth and with no disrespect to them, and I look at them from the outside, are indistinguishable. There is a cultural difference in terms of remote Civil War affiliations and a somewhat more subtle cultural difference in terms of some of the extreme aspects of their demographics of support but, by and large, they occupy the same part of the left-right debate in economic matters. It is interesting that in the current debate on the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, one group was subject to the Whip and one group was not, but the same spectrum of opinions is apparent across both parties. I suspect that if both were subject to the Whip and both were not subject to the Whip, we would see a roughly similar proportion of Deputies going with and against the party's wishes on this Bill and its contentious amendments. We have this strange system that places a high premium on personality, because if one's policy vision is the same as that of the next man or woman and one is looking for what we call product differentiation, one is differentiating it on matters other than one's political ideas.

I would love to see fundamental reform of the entire Oireachtas. Imperfect as the Seanad is, and we are speaking on section 1 of the Bill to abolish the Seanad, if the contention in section 1 were defeated and instead the reforms Senators Quinn, Zappone and I had suggested, and there are only nuanced differences among them, were included as part of a reform process, we would at least have one House of our national Parliament that was elected with a national focus. It would be a less powerful House, it would not be one which could thwart the wishes of the other House under our Constitution, but it would still be nationally focused. Instead, what we will have is one House that will be regionally focused, with no one with a national focus, and which will have a scrutineer function that will be taken from the imperfect quasi-democracy that is the electoral system of Seanad Éireann and entrusted completely to a group who will be appointed by the Taoiseach. Everything about section 1 is wrong, and that is the reason I believe it should be defeated.