Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Cathaoirleach. I was attempting to accommodate my colleague's amnesia.

I welcome Senator Naughton to the House. I hope she has many happy and fruitful years here. I note that she is a classically trained soprano, which will be good news when the Taoiseach lights up the Christmas tree. He needs singers every Christmas. I see too that she played the part of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady and won a prize. She is also recorded as having said in 2011 that the councillors in Galway had been doing the bidding of a hidden elite for 20 years. They might be useful allies when she is here, because we were saying words to that effect last week. She is most welcome and she has a superb role model to follow in Senator McAleese.

Could the Leader arrange a debate on the most important article in today's Irish Independent by Dr. Muiris MacCarthaigh from the politics department in Queen's University, in which he writes about executive accountability, and not the abolition of this House, as the key point in reforming Irish governance? The Executive is not the sole purveyor of good policy. He asks that we look at what has been happening in new legislatures in Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh, as we suggested here recently, and says that we need to be active rather than reactive in influencing the national policy agenda. He writes that the need to rethink how Parliament can protect and promote the public interest has never been more pressing. What we need is a new standard of parliamentary government. The power of the Executive is something which should exercise us far more because, rather like the hidden elite which our new Senator says is running Galway, there is a hidden elite running Ireland, and we need parliamentary accountability. I ask the Leader to arrange a debate on Dr. Muiris MacCarthaigh's article early in the next session.