John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

None of these people works in influential positions or is sitting around the Cabinet table. As a result of the quirks of our Constitution and 43 local elections which determine who will make the major macroeconomic decisions for the country, we had a group of people who were, without being critical, heavily personally incentivised not to break bad news. They did not want to be the ones who would say there would be a problem. They did not want to tell people who suddenly felt rich because the three bedroom houses they had owned for years were suddenly worth multiples of hundreds of thousands of euro, who believed that because of some fundamental rewriting of the laws of economics, they had changed into wealthy people, even though they were still doing the same meaningful, skilled jobs and working as hard as they always were, that there was a problem. Salaries were no bigger and people still did what they did before, but they felt richer. It is very difficult for a politician focused on local electoral issues to say he or she is sorry to have to tell people that there is a shell game going on, people have been scammed and we need to change things. Maybe if we had a different system of selecting Deputies and Ministers we might have had a better way of dealing with such a situation.

I have a day job and I like to think I am perhaps what the framers of the Constitution had in mind.

They wanted to bring in people who on the one hand, understood that there were more politically sophisticated people who were full-time politicians and made the big decisions while they, on the other hand, could bring a different perspective on some of the decisions made and offer different skills. I like to think I have done that in my little area. I know for a fact that this man sitting on my right has done it in a colossal way in economics and I believe he has been an educational resource for Members of both Houses. One must then ask how Senator Barrett would have functioned with the current Whip system. There a few people in the dominant party of Government who, although they might not have been economists with PhDs, had strongly dissenting views on some issues, particularly those related to banking, and it would appear that they were whipped into submission. We had the strange situation of one Deputy who, at his own committee, spoke one way and voted another because his expertise and heart told him one thing and his Whip told him to do the other. One of my colleagues has just informed me that the home of Irish horse racing - horseracing.ie- has stated that there are numerical limits relating to the number of times the whip can be used in a race. It can be used seven times in a flat face and eight times in a jumps race. Whoever is in charge of Deputy Mathews would have been disqualified and a steward's inquiry would have been held within about three days of the initiation of the first meeting of the current Dáil.

Sadly, the Whip system works in here. I know this for a fact because I have become very friendly with many of my colleagues on both sides of the House. In many cases, they have sincere, well-thought out and well-informed positions which are at complete variance with those of their party and as a result, are whipped into submission. Again, I do not wish to personalise this. I have huge personal and professional regard for the extraordinary, methodical and forensic scrutiny of Bills, particularly health Bills, by Senator Colm Burke in this House. To see him advance a really important Bill addressing a technical niche that had been neglected in the programmes for Government of successive governments and be defeated by his own Government was instructive. It tells us something about where reforms really need to take place.

What was that great line during the week? One should always use the words "in conclusion" multiple times in a speech because it gives one's audience hope. In summary, I am a complete reformer. I believe the arguments advanced for defending this House as it is currently constituted as a critical bulwark of democracy are not very strong. The principal arguments are those relating to what it could be and the opportunity cost of losing something that we cannot easily get back in a reformed format. I mentioned it to the Minister of State's colleagues who were here before. To most of us who have looked at this, it is simply and deeply offensive that this was never considered for discussion at the Constitutional Convention. What could be a more fundamental constitutional question for a democracy than the structure of its national parliament? Most of us have had the privilege of visiting the convention on a number of occasions. I found it to be a very rewarding experience and a wonderful way of engaging with and hearing the opinions of our citizenry - not just some elected elite of our citizenry but real citizens, many of whom were no more involved or interested in or knowledgeable about politics than the average citizen. What a wonderful idea it would have been if they had been given the opportunity to discuss the actual structure of their national Parliament. I am sorry if I am being repetitive. Both the Cathaoirleach and Minister of State were not here when I said it earlier. The fact that the convention discussed whether the President, which is a largely ceremonial office although potentially constitutionally crucial given the right circumstances, would have a five-year rather than a seven-year term but it was not considered valid to discuss the entire structure of our Parliament is very regrettable.

Our considered opposition to section 1 of the Bill relates to the heart of the matter which is that, without invoking any dictatorial autocracy, it comes across as being arrogant. There was no constituency pushing for this. There was a certain constituency pushing for retention and a larger constituency for reform. The reform constituency prominently included our Taoiseach. He was one of those who at a summer school articulated very fine ideas about what the Seanad could do in a reformed structure. Apparently without any particular consultation and in a country with colossal economic problems caused by people, politicians and the political system we had, he did not decide as his first constitutional priority to ask what we could do to prevent those set of circumstances occurring again by possibly giving us a different level of expertise in Government. Instead, he decided that we will do it because it is a waste of money when the Minister most directly responsible for public expenditure and reform, Deputy Howlin, told us while sitting in the chair in which the Minister of State now sits that it will save no money and that the money will be redeployed to less democratic Dáil committees buttressed by technocratic appointees who will become the non-accountable scrutineers of legislation, supplanting the role of our surrogate democracy, which is the Seanad.

On that, I must freely admit that I am spent. I urge the Minister of State to take our message on board and consider that this rushed, unthoughtful, pointless, non-money-saving, misleading and misleadingly blameful initiative to abolish the Seanad without giving our people any chance to discuss its reform should be reconsidered in good faith.