John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is true. There is precedence for this kind of very confusing technical referendum occurring. It occurred in 2002, which is one of the referendums whose consequences we are currently grappling with in terms of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill.

I looked in from the outside and put in writing that the Seanad should be abolished or reformed. I still believe that but I would prefer to reform it. As somebody who is in here and sees the dysfunctions of the two Houses, I see an extraordinary argument for launching a process of parliamentary reform which would involve, in effect, writing a new constitution. I do not think there is a shortcut around this. We do not have a good mechanism for doing that in Ireland because our current Constitution cleverly keeps unto the Taoiseach and the Government the sole right to introduce amending provisions for the Constitution.

There does not seem to be a shortcut other than democratically seizing power and advancing a new constitution in a very radical format. We can, within the existing Constitution, examine the two Houses we have. We have it within our gift to advance meaningful reform of the House which would give us, instead of the de-democratised, single chamber parliament we would have operating in a lacuna with no strong committee system, fewer checks and balances and without local government, one nationally focused house which would still, because of its constitutional mandate and limitations, be a reflective scrutinising chamber which could not thwart the wishes of the more powerful Dáil but which could act the nidus for more fundamental reform.

I do not want to make personal comments. Most Ministers, given the system we have, do a very good job. In truth, as I have said before, the reality is that we do not have a particularly good system for picking Ministers. We have a particular pool of available people which may contain people who are talented, skilled and have skill sets which can match various Departments, but it also contains those who may not.

I understand populism when people say things such as our first reform should be to abolish the Seanad and our second reform should be to shrink the Dáil. That would create a lacuna. If one shrinks the Dáil before one changes the way one appoints Ministers, I am not being pejorative when I say we will have an even shallower talent pool from which to pick Ministers. We will have a smaller number of people from which to pick critical and, in some cases, highly technical ministerial appointments. Poor Descartes must be turning in his grave.

We have a need for a shopping list of mandatory constitutional reforms. It as if a mother has taken a basket with a screaming child through a supermarket, has ignored milk, meat and potatoes and nappies and has instead gone straight for the sweets at the checkout, bought them first and worried about the rest later. It is a simple and populist option which gives the illusion of reforming zeal and momentum to the process of parliamentary reform without grappling with the core issues which need to be fixed.

In 2007 and 2008, when critical decisions could have been made, but were not, which might have ameliorated the worst aspects of the economic collapse, the fault was not with Seanad Éireann. To do an analogy to death, the Seanad was asleep at the tiller but was guilty of sins of omission rather than commission. It was the Dáil which ratified the Ministers who made the decisions.

Even though we have now had a change of Government, a similar process is in place as well as policies which are very similar to those of the post-meltdown policies advanced by Fianna Fáil. There was broad consensus between the two parties as to the mid-course corrective actions which needed to be taken. I am sure my Fianna Fáil colleagues will resonate with that, but there is not that much difference between what they said after the terrible mistakes they made in the post-meltdown process and what the incoming Government did.

Imagine if instead we had a Government which included some economists - I will not mention names because they are broadly divided - and people who really understood banking. People who knew about banking and looked at it from the outside have been documented as saying there was a real problem, even though they did not predict the last recession.