Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister may be looking forward to ongoing discourse. I am quite tired of ongoing discourse because, with respect, the discourse has moved backwards. In the last Oireachtas the Government pretended it wanted to deliver Seanad reform. In the current Oireachtas, the Government has removed it from the programme for Government. It is clear it has taken only the action it has been forced to take. I have listened to the comments over a numbers of years, including before I entered this House, because I also campaigned for retention of the Seanad. I listened to language about how it is complex and how things need to be teased out. That was the rationale given by the then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, when asking us to establish the Seanad reform implementation group. We were told it was complicated and needed to be teased out. We teased it out. We produced solutions. We now say all of that teasing out, which we were told was important, has been set aside. Meanwhile the long-awaited electoral commission is only building up to an issue which has been the pressing democratic deficit in Irish society since 1979, the year the Taoiseach was born. That is not good enough. It is simply not good enough to say we are working towards that. It is on our long list. The Seanad is half of the legislative process in these Houses. We are making important decisions that affect people's lives. I welcome the Minister's engagement with me and we have made amendments to legislation, which have been accepted. That is exactly the case. Should not everybody have a vote and a say in who brings into legislation those vocational perspectives that are thematic rather than geographical? I want every person in Ireland to have somebody speaking about what matters to him or her, on the vocational panels and others. We have waited way too long for any of that. With respect, the idea that this is something on the long list or wish list for the electoral commission down the line is not satisfactory. The evidence does not show we are moving forward. The evidence shows we have moved backwards. Now the issue we have been told is so complex that our very detailed and well thought through Bill, which was drafted by a parliamentary drafter and paid for by the Government, will be fixed up between a couple of Cabinet meetings. Something will be landed on us before 31 July that will not involve engagement with the public. It will not involve engagement with the legislature, or with any of those who put months and years of their lives into studying the issue. It will not involve the experts who were selected to serve on the electoral commission because they are good at thinking about elections. It will simply be something the Ministers will produce and land in a couple of months. That is really inadequate.