Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----who are incapable of discharging certain functions and incapable of being counted simply as members of the commission to form a quorum. That amuses me. If the House were to provide that Senators from the agricultural panel would not be capable of chairing in the absence of the Chair, would not be counted for a quorum or something like that, the injustice of it would be clear to us. It would not be a statement that only Senators from the agricultural panel should chair the Seanad. It would be simply that they were being relegated to second class status on a body which is supposed to be collegiate.

I have a funny feeling that the sum total of all of this will be that the lawyers on the commission will form an effective majority because they capture one or two of the members who are lay members. They will say that because the Minister, Deputy Ross, was so vindictive towards them, once they have one ally in this entire process, they will dominate it. That is clearly open to them as a response to being insulted collectively in this way. They might say, "We are, together, the second class citizens - the helots - in this regime and if we have one ally from the other side, we will assert our rights consistently and coherently as a group." Would that be a good outcome? It would not. Even if it was accepted as a good idea, and I do not believe it is a good idea, to have a lay chairperson by definition, surely after that we can drop the idea of reducing the legal members of the commission to second class citizen status.

When we get on to the next section we will realise that even the smallest committee has to have a lay majority and a lay chairman, for whatever purpose. It is stupid and defies belief that the majority cannot set up a committee unless they rule it with one of themselves as a majority member and insist that the composition of the committee is also a lay majority. I despair at the lack of reason in this provision.

I would have thought that if the Houses of the Oireachtas were to nominate a lay person to be chair and that person is specially mentioned in a resolution of both Houses, in the unavoidable absence of such a person to act as chairperson, the great majority of Members of this House would have no objection whatsoever to the Chief Justice or even a practising solicitor taking the place of the nominated lay person at a meeting for the afternoon. I do not believe that if we all had a free hand to decide what would happen in such circumstances, we would waste legislative time finding out which persons cannot sit in the chair on such an occasion.