Dáil musical chairs, rapid fire vote buzzer round raises questions
THE thrills and spills and cut and thrust of politics may be more Westminster than Dáil Eireann these days, but the Dáil threw up its own uniquely Irish drama last week when it emerged our Fianna Fáil elected members have been voting for their friends in a seemingly collective game of Whack A Mole.
The hand wringing has already begun as the latest scandal to bring TDs to their knees erupts around them.
It first emerged over the weekend that Niall Collins voted for fellow Fianna Fáil TD Timmy Dooley six times in one session while Dooley was outside the chamber on a phone call. A clear case of Where’s Timmy, (Wally was probably off voting in some corner of the chamber for someone else).
This raises another question, should there be a phone ban within the chamber. A seasoned Dáil correspondent spoke of how inseparable numerous TDs and ministers are from their phones. You wonder is their mind on the job. Added to this is that auld chestnut, the Dáil bar bill.
Reports that the bill, which can climb to tens of thousands of euros, remains unpaid circulate, like clockwork, every December. Last year around €275,000 was spent in the Dáil bar, around a quarter of which went on booze (the rest was on more brain boosting tea and coffee).
But back to the voting. It emerged over the weekend that the Fianna Fail party’s Brexit spokesperson Lisa Chambers was after voting for deputy leader Dara Calleary in the same set of votes. The TD was beside herself, not only in the Dáil but also on Morning Ireland on Monday morning as she tried to row back on the scandal, claiming she was a victim of being busy and of mishearing a question put to her two days earlier on the radio when she replied in the negative that she had never voted for someone else. Chambers said she took this question to mean intentionally voting for another TD. She said she ‘inadvertently’ sat in Calleary’s seat, which is beside her own in the chamber. She had ‘pressed the button in error’ during a radio interview.
Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan has said he is ‘very concerned’ that two Fianna Fáil TDs voted for colleagues while they were absent from the Dáil chamber. Then, in a further twist straight out of The Thick of It, he admitted on Monday that he has pushed a voting button for a colleague in the past, but never when that TD was outside the Dáil chamber. He said there may be occasions where a TD is on their way to their seat and their neighbour may press the button for them ‘in anticipation and in expectation of that person taking their seat’.
Do our TDs have worms from too many sugars in their coffee and too many biscuits and Snack bars at the Dáil bar? ‘The issue here is one of the sanctity of the chamber. After a period of eight minutes the doors of the chamber are sealed. Anybody who’s in the chamber is invited to vote, anybody who’s outside the chamber has no entitlement at all. The issue is the illegal nature, the unlawful act of proxy voting which is a really serious misdemeanour within out parliamentary system,’ he said.’ Minister Flanagan said. The prospect of an Inquisition looms with all TDs being grilled over proxy voting.