Taking the tribal element out of Dáil will help process of reform

BACK in the Nineties I went to visit the Bundestag.

The odd thing about it was, it wasn’t in Berlin. This was back in about 1995. Germany had been reunited since 1990, and it was pretty obvious that the logical place to put the parliament was in the reunited capital city of that great reunited country.

The only people who disagreed, really, were the people of Bonn. For years, in fact since the end of the Third Reich and the building of the Iron Curtain, the capital of West Germany was Bonn. In fact all the discussion about reunification took place in Bonn, and all the necessary legislation was debated and passed in the old Parliament building there. The city had served the people of Germany well, they felt, and they wanted to keep the parliament.