Doing nothing is better than acting for the wrong reasons
There is something the ‘Do-nothing Dail’ could do — stop making so many bad laws, writes Eoin O’Malley
THE ‘Do-nothing Dail’ must be getting a little embarrassed. News that last year the Oireachtas passed fewer bills than in any other in the history of the State has given ‘new politics’ a bad name. Last week, commentators complained that of many votes on motions in the Dail very few passed. In response, the Government, and others in opposition, are supplying copious numbers of bills.
Many of the bills are of dubious quality. The Dail’s rules mean that bringing forward a private member’s bill gives a TD a lot more time and attention than if they put down a motion. Motions don’t become law, they just signal the Dail’s position on something. Many of the bills people bring forward read like motions, and are so poorly written that hopefully they will never actually become laws.
Which is why we shouldn’t be so upset at the low number of bills being passed into law. As well as making laws, a part of a parliament’s job is to make good laws better and to reject bad ones. The willingness of the Dail to reject bills, including the Government’s ones, is a good thing. Too many people think passing laws is a measure of the Oireachtas’s productivity. How many bad laws were passed in the past 20 years because governments had no one who could say no to it?
There is too much criticism of ‘new politics’, and a lot of the critics conflate the changed Dail rules with the fact that our minority Government will cave in on almost anything to avoid an election, and hasn’t the confidence or the numbers to propose big policy measures.
But the Government is anxious that this ‘Do-nothing Dail’ name is sticking and concerned that Fine Gael and the Independent Alliance could be damaged by it. In response we see a raft of proposals.
Most are small measures that ignore the more substantial issues.
One example. Last Friday may be the last Good Friday that pubs remained closed in Ireland.
The ban is a quaint relic of a different Ireland. It probably should go, but it is just a symbol of a deeper issue, and going after the largely symbolic drinking ban does nothing to address the issue of the Church’s almost complete control of the delivery of primary education in Ireland. The Government doesn’t have the power or inclination to address it, so instead it does something small that makes it look active.
This is the political equivalent of the lazy labourer moving their shovel regularly but not shifting any soil. They give the appearance of work without doing any heavy lifting.
Shane Ross’s bill on road safety is one such measure. It completely ignores the actual evidence on road safety, but makes emotionally appealing claims about the ability to save 35 lives. How can we reject such a measure if it saves lives? His apparent motivation is that there was a small rise in road deaths last year.
Ross is lucky that the Dublin 4 set’s stage villain, Danny Healy-Rae, led the charge against it. But the 35 lives drops to 16 (or three a year) when you look at the data for a few minutes, and falls again when we consider how the data are collected. It includes deaths where the driver wasn’t drunk. There’s no evidence that last year’s rise is systematic, or caused by a rise in drunk driving. Healy-Rae made the entirely reasonable point that other causes could be at play, but, unsurprisingly, he was lambasted.
Meanwhile, Minister for Justice and Equality Frances Fitzgerald is getting in on the act. She’s considering a change to the law to force cyclists to wear helmets and high-vis clothing. This is presumably in response to the rise in number of cyclists killed on the road this year. It’s a cheap and easy way to look like the Government is doing something, without actually trying to understand the problem.
One of the reasons for the rise is that there are far more people cycling. The rise in deaths might mask the possibility that cycling may be getting safer. But the proposal is a good example of victim blaming. Cyclists are at risk because there aren’t many quality cycle lanes. Deal with that and you address a lot of problems — traffic, health, child obesity, greenhouse gas emissions.
While cyclists do have a duty to ensure they can be seen, that’s already the law. It’s not really enforced. A new law that won’t be enforced won’t help. When we know some laws aren’t regarded as important, then we are more willing to break other laws. The ‘do-nothing Dail’ could do something: stop making bad laws.
‘Shane Ross is lucky that the Dublin 4 set’s stage villain, Danny HealyRae, led the charge against his road safety bill...’