Surely you don’t expect the Dáil to address issues that really matter?

LAST week friends of Olunkunle Eluhanla, a 16-year old boy deported by the Government, picketed outside the Dáil.

Many of them were perplexed and disgusted that their Government could do this to a boy, their school friend, and believed that our Government deserved to be held to account in the matter.

They wanted to talk to TDs and ministers, to explain the danger to which their friend had been exposed, to plead for help for him.

But there was no one there last week to listen. No way to hold the Government to account. And there won’t be too many there if the friends of Olunkunle Eluhanla come back this week, as they are planning to do.

You probably missed all the Dáil activity last week. The votes, the attacks on Government policy, the searching debates about the murder of Robert McCartney, the opportunity for the parliament of the people to mark our national feast day with full debate.

No? You didn’t notice all that? Well, it wasn’t because it wasn’t reported. It was because it didn’t happen. The Dáil took a week off last week. We’re not sure whether it was for St Patrick’s Day or for Cheltenham.

But the good news is that our national parliament will be back this week. Anyone fancy a motion re bilateral convention on social security, which will result in referral to committee without debate, and will be handled by the Department of Social and Family Affairs?

No? Well how about a motion re Rotterdam convention, also aimed at referral to committee without debate, this time handled by the Department of Agriculture and Food?

Neither will take long - in fact it takes longer to read them than it will to nod them through. And that will leave plenty of time for statements on the national development plan, led by the Department of Finance, and a number of meandering speeches on the Garda Siochána Bill 2004, if there’s time.

It’s a busy, demanding day, as you can see. And just in case you’ve lost me already, I’m talking about the schedule of Dáil activity today. Tomorrow will be busier, with a Government motion on the setting up of a tribunal of inquiry into the fatal killing of RUC chief superintendent Harry Breen and RUC superintendent Robert Buchanan in 1989 (to conclude within 3.30hrs), and that will be followed at 3.30 by - wait for it - statements on the Irish Language.

Again, if there’s time (and there probably won’t be), we’ll have a bit more of the debate on the principles of the Garda Siochána Bill 2004.

The statements on the Irish language, however, will resume on Thursday morning, and they will be followed by yet more statements, this time on the incarceration of a Zimbabwean opposition MP, Roy Bennett. Oh, yes, and if there’s still time, we can have some more speeches about the Garda Siochána Bill.

This bill might seem like a vitally important measure to you and me - there’s even a possibility that it might be one of those bills that will change the nature of our society. But it is being used as ‘filler’ material in the Dáil this week. It will be discussed if they run out of other things to talk about.

This is parliament played as farce. Throughout the entire week, there will be no votes, no measures of any real accountability, no test for the Government whatsoever. The Taoiseach and half his ministers won’t even be there. But the Dáil will still go through these motions.

And then, once the week is over, they’re shutting it down altogether for another two weeks. That’s the Easter break. When they come back, the Dáil will work for about another ten weeks before the summer recess - a full three months off, probably.

We’ve been through all this before, of course. And I’m always one of the people who defends the work TDs do. But more and more under this Government, more and more over the last ten years, the work of our national parliamentarians has become ritualistic and meaningless.

THE murder of Robert McCartney, and its implications for peace, has yet to be seriously debated in the Dáil. The nursing home scandal and the Travers report into that scandal got about two hours of rushed debate before the report could be studied and digested.

The O’Hara family case that I wrote about here last week has yet to get any real debate, even though it has raised a good deal of unease and disquiet around the country. The continued deportation of people whose only crime is to want to make a better life for themselves here in Ireland is virtually a taboo subject.

There is certainly no sense where any of these issues - and you could add your own list, I feel sure - are being taken seriously by Government, or where the Government is being held properly to account for them.

Judge Liam Hamilton, in a ruling in the course of the Beef Tribunal, once said: “It is, inter alia, the duty of the members of the Oireachtas to elect a Government, to legislate and to look diligently into every affair of Government. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents and to inform and be informed by them.”

Does that sound like Dáil Eireann as we know it? In our democracy, in addition to making law, the Dáil is supposed to identify who should form the government of the day (and part of the job of opposition is to establish that better alternatives exist).

It is supposed to ensure that government is accountable to the people. It is meant to provide a public platform for discussion and investigation of major issues. It approves the raising of taxes, and the way in which the money is spent.

It watches, appraises and criticises the activities of government and the public service. It provides a forum for individuals to raise issues and grievances indirectly through its members.

All of these are essential functions. And all of them demand that Dáil Eireann be seen to be a busy, vibrant place, open to the people and always vigilant on their behalf. So how has it come to be seen instead as a sleepy, comfortable rest-home? It’s not the fault of opposition leaders, that’s for sure, who chafe at the bit during the endless weeks that the Dáil is in recess. (Though I sometimes suspect that if Pat Rabbitte and Enda Kenny were to go to their wider parliamentary parties and announce a cunning plan to force the Dáil to sit for forty weeks a year, they’d get little thanks for it from their own).

Whatever the reason, the harsh reality is that when people want accountability now, the last place they look is the national parliament. That level of irrelevance is entirely corrosive.

When parliamentary democracy becomes undermined and irrelevant, to the point where people have stopped bothering to vote, we are on the shore of a very dangerous sea. The other reality is that the Dáil, through its indolence over the years, has contributed much to its own irrelevance.