A good chance wasted
The people agreed. Fine Gael’s five-point-plan pledged a “new politics” to fix the broken system. To deliver “new politics”, Mr Kenny promised to “hold a referendum on Constitution Day, within 12 months of assuming office, at which the people will be asked to approve the abolition of the Seanad and changes to other articles of the Constitution covering the institutions of the State — principally the executive, the Dáil, the presidency and the judiciary”.
In government, Labour and Fine Gael promised a Constitutional Convention. Tánaiste Éamon Gilmore recently upped the ante for change by pledging Labour’s support for gay marriage. The Taoiseach, however, preferred to dive over flower pots last week rather than explain where he stands on that issue.
The Constitutional Convention will consist of 100 members. Of those, 66 will be ordinary citizens chosen with the help of a polling company from the electoral register; 33 will be made up of Oireachtas members and one parliamentarian from each of the political parties in the North which accept an invitation to be represented.
The Government proposes the convention will examine the following matters:
* Review of the Dáil electoral system;
* Reducing the presidential term to five years and aligning it with local and European elections;
* Giving citizens the right to vote at Irish embassies in presidential elections;
* Provision for same-sex marriage;
* Amending the clause on the role of women in the home and encouraging greater participation of women in public life;
* Increasing the participation of women in politics;
* Removing blasphemy from our Constitution;
* Reducing the voting age to 17.
The Government proposes that the convention look at just two matters initially; reducing the presidential term to five years and reducing the voting age to 17. Neither of these issues is fundamental. Losing one referendum last October and realising the scale of political capital, government time and party resources needed to win the Fiscal Stability Treaty referendum has daunted the Government.
The Oireachtas inquiries referendum floundered on a design to transform politicians into elected judges. It was an astonishing over-reach to propose that it would be for the Oireachtas “to determine the appropriate balance between the rights of persons and the public interest”.
Now a potential inquiry into the bank guarantee scheme has degenerated into a turf war between competing committees. Finding the answers seems less important than grabbing the limelight.
The abolition of the Seanad is excluded from the convention agenda. Reviewing the Dáil electoral system is not now a priority. It would be far more useful if the Seanad was reformed and the Dáil were transformed. The Seanad in its imperfect state is a more diverse body than the Dáil. Some of the credit for that is due to the Taoiseach’s imaginative and applauded range of nominees.
A strengthened and diverse upper house with real powers of inquisition over ministers and civil servants would be a far better cure for what actually ails political Ireland. The rejected referendum on Oireachtas inquiries would have intruded on the judiciary and the rights of the citizen.
A more measured proposal on the powers of Oireachtas committees would have served better. It came a cropper because like the notion of abolishing the Seanad it was ill-conceived, over-the-top and plainly political.
The powerlessness of the Oireachtas is not in relation to the citizen; it is in relation to the Government. That powerlessness has two chief causes. One is the lack of effective accountability of ministers to the Dáil and Seanad and the almost non-existent accountability of senior civil servants to either government or the Oireachtas in relation to their management role.
Because ministers are technically in charge of the administration of departments, officials who are charged and paid to manage are not in any effective sense legally accountable.
Neither, were such powers to exist, does our parliament have the access to and regular scrutiny of senior officials needed to make accountability real.
The debris of a broken political system continues to accumulate. Based on a largely unaccountable authority, an intellectually inadequate system is immune from effective engagement.
As plans are considered to either merge together or absorb our one or more of our national cultural institutions into their parent department, the Oireachtas debated the issues at length two weeks ago. If a cost-benefit analysis exists neither the public nor parliamentarians could have it. Cabinet confidentiality was used to prevent people and parliament from knowing either the detail or the substance of what is being considered.
Public consultation on researched and costed options would risk ceding control. And control of information is the default chromosome in the DNA of broken politics. The second and most acute weakness of our parliament is its electoral system. The multi-seat constituency dictates that we get politics that are programmed to fail. It is difficult to get elected, let alone re-elected, in a multi-seat constituency and deliver the parliamentary scrutiny needed to hold government and its officials to account. Our national legislature is a county council and our county councils are a joke. A past decade when social partnership could operate as an extra-parliamentary legislature only further underlines the weakness of our parliament. Failure to tackle the Dáil electoral system, will leave broken politics intact. The electoral system is the core of our problem.
Effective accountability remains a miasma because of it. Long-term planning is prey to short-term exigency. Abolishing the Seanad and leaving the Dáil unreformed will entrench all our problems without solving any of them. The agenda for the Constitutional Convention indicates it is intended as a soft landing for lost opportunities.
* Gerard Howlin is a public affairs professional and a former senior political adviser.
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