Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Two motions are being discussed before the House but if one is taken, the likelihood is the other will not be taken.That structure is forced upon us by what happened in this House approximately six months ago. Members of this House, particularly the newer Members, should know that on St. Brigid's Day 2018, Leo Varadkar came in here and promised us a vast raft of reforms. Every single one of those reforms he abandoned and betrayed. None of them have happened at all, not even, as the Cathaoirleach will know, the one in relation to the European Union statutory instruments. It has collapsed, for the time being at any rate, due to the attitude taken by the Government and its legal adviser.

One of the things Leo Varadkar came into this House and said he wanted to bring about was that there would be a secret ballot among Members when the positions of Cathaoirleach and Leas-Chathaoirleach came to be decided, as is the case in Dáil Éireann. He promised that on that occasion. On foot of that, a number of us worked, with the assistance of the staff of the House, to craft an elaborate standing order in the English and Irish languages dealing with this issue and to put in place a system whereby every Member of this House, when it comes to choosing its officers, could choose freely and away from the party Whip and Government and caucus decisions whether she or he believed one or other candidate, or one of a number of candidates, was the correct person to be elected to those offices. I regret to say that standing order came before the Committee on Procedure and Privileges of this House and was, without explanation, simply cast aside. Nobody even gave a reason it should not happen. It was simply swept aside at that meeting. A motion was put down by the Seanad Independent Group to amend Standing Orders before the last general election to bring it about in this House. Again, it was just voted down by the Government parties - the Green Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil - at the time without any real explanation.

At this stage, that being the case, we have two excellent candidates before us in Senators Byrne and Flynn. They are very good candidates with their own merits. Doubtless, there could have been others as well. We could, if the promises made to us had been kept, even in the tiniest degree, have had the right to make our private decision as to which of these people was the appropriate person to elect. We could have made a private, secret decision on their merits or demerits as we saw them individually, but that was taken away from us by a cynical process of abandoning every commitment to reform this House. We are, therefore, unlike Dáil Éireann, in a position where we have to decide on this matter subject to the party Whip via public vote and in a process that is wholly unacceptable. It does not happen in Westminster, it does not happen in Dáil Éireann and it was not going to happen here, only for the fact that Leo Varadkar broke his word to this House.

I just want to put all that on the record. For that reason, although I see the merits of both candidates in this election, for my part I am not going to participate in this election as a mark of my rejection of the cynicism that has led us to select our officers in this way, despite all the flowery commitments given on 1 February 2018 in respect of it being the last occasion on which the officers of this House were going to be elected in this way.