Our Dail needs proper parliamentarians — not puny ones

Many TDs don’t speak and many speak rarely. We could learn from how debate takes place in other parliaments, writes Liam Weeks

THE issue of ‘buttongate’ arose at an international conference last week (admittedly brought up by yours truly in attendance). The theme of the gathering was the politics of parliamentary debate, not usually a topic that gets the pulse racing, but it proved useful in contextualising the current Dail controversy of voting by proxy.

Listening to the different conference presentations covering about 20 countries, it was evident that Irish TDs have more independence and power to speak in parliament than most of their contemporary counterparts.

In many countries, particularly those using list electoral systems, where voters can only pick parties, not candidates, party organisations and elites have complete control over who speaks in parliament. For example, in the Spanish Cortes, 30pc of deputies never get to speak.

Indeed, one of the leading comparative academic studies of parliamentary debates placed Ireland in what the authors called an ‘extreme category’ in terms of the independence and freedom afforded to our TDs in their capacity to address the Dail chamber.

And yet, in spite of these powers, many TDs don’t speak, and many speak rarely. In my contribution to the conference, a paper co-written with colleagues from the US and Germany on 22 years of Dail debates between 1989 and 2011, we found 10pc of TDs never spoke in the lifetime of a Dail, and 40pc spoke less than 100 times.

Examples such as Trevor Sargent, who spoke 1,410 times in the 29th Dail, between 2002 and 2007, are few and far between.

This doesn’t mean our TDs are lazy, or are idling away their time in the Dail bar. We know, for example, that they ask a lot of written questions. One study of eight English-speaking democracies found TDs ask the most such questions of all, around 250 per year on average. Michael HealyRae alone submitted 1,311 written questions last year.

This conveys a particular mentality among TDs about their role, and explains why buttongate happened. But the real issue concerning this controversy is neither the constitutionality of the TDs’ actions nor their morality. It is the irrelevance of the topic.

Yes, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have their backroom staff browsing hours of Dail footage to find their rivals engaging in this indefensible activity. And, yes, there have been suggestions this has the parties in election mood.

But buttongate will not reverberate as an election issue with the public because it doesn’t matter to them. Why not? Because the Dail doesn’t matter to them. This is the reality of parliamentary democracy in Ireland. The lax attitude of some of our TDs to voting in the chamber confirms what we’ve known for a long time, that the Dail struggles to retain meaning and relevance.

For example, one of the Dail’s primary functions, as specified in the Constitution, is to legislate, and in this aspect, the Dail fails. Even though Article 15.2 clearly states that, “The sole and exclusive power of making laws for the State is hereby vested in the Oireachtas: no other legislative authority has power to make laws for the State”, the Dail has ceded almost all power in this respect to the Government.

Virtually all legislation originates in Cabinet. Between 1937 and 2005, only 15 private members’ bills, those proposed by the opposition, passed and became legislation. This number has increased recently in the era of new politics, but even now with the Government having a small minority, it still dominates the legislative process. One study by the Irish Examiner showed that of the 114 bills passed in the first three years of this Dail, 104 were directly from the Government.

We might query how well the Dail is doing its job in other areas. For example, when making policy, ministers are more inclined to talk with interest groups outside parliament, than TDs in it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the formation of the Budget, when the office of the Finance Minister is a revolving door for different interests looking for their slice of the State pie.

The Dail is also supposed to scrutinise the Government. But, as the buttongate issue has shown, if the Dail can’t effectively scrutinise itself, then how can we expect it to police Government any better?

This is why adjectives such as ‘supine’, ‘woefully inadequate’, and ‘puny’ have been used to describe the Dail by a range of scholars.

In fact, most of the criticisms of the Dail are similar to the justifications given for holding a referendum on abolishing the Seanad in 2013. Presumably most of us are not in favour of calling a similar vote on the Dail’s future, but this should not prevent us from asking what is the raison d’etre of our TDs.

If they are not speaking in parliament, nor legislating, nor always voting, then what is their purpose? What do they actually do?

A survey of TDs for the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution 10 years ago provides some insight on their functions. It found that TDs on average spend 53pc of their time on constituency issues, and 38pc on legislative-related work. When asked to rank the importance of their various duties as a member of parliament, TDs ranked three constituency-based activities higher than any activity to do with legislation.

Of TDs’ constituency work, 40pc of their time was spent dealing with local constituents’ cases, which means that TDs spend more than 20pc of their overall time on such casework. This is the number one activity engaged in by all TDs.

And this is a major factor why TDs are not more active in the Dail, and why they get their colleagues to vote in their place. In the words of the late Trinity Professor Basil Chubb, they are too busy “going about persecuting civil servants” on their constituents’ behalf.

Many decry this form of behaviour by our parliamentarians, claiming this is not what they were elected to do. Regardless of the merits of this point, one of the reasons why our TDs have developed a lackadaisical attitude towards the Dail is because of the redundancy of their role in the chamber.

Parliaments worldwide are often grouped into a binary division between ‘debating’ or ‘working’ parliaments. In the former, such as the British House of Commons, genuine debate takes place on the floor of parliament, where the

Government is held to account. In working chambers the plenary session of parliament is little more than a dead arena for MPs to read out carefully prepared speeches to empty seats. The real action in working parliaments takes place behind the scenes in committees, where policy and legislation are thrashed out.

In the Irish case, the Dail is neither a debating nor a working parliament. There is a Danish joke that if you want to keep something secret you should announce it in parliament, since nobody will hear it, and the same could be said of the Dail. This does not mask an effective working parliament, since our committee system, the key to any such successful model, remains woefully underdeveloped.

This is why issues like buttongate emerge. And why similar controversies are likely to follow.

Our Dail is not fit for the 21st century. If we want our TDs to fulfil their role adequately, we need to develop an institution that will give them the capacity to be proper parliamentarians. Not puny ones.

Dr Liam Weeks is a lecturer in the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork