Does Dáil Éireann do a good job for the Irish people?
NO:
During and after a recent Dáil debate on a Fine Gael motion on education for children with autism, it became clear that perhaps a dozen TDs from the Government parties agreed with its broad thrust. There was therefore a majority among the elected representatives of the people for a policy that would respond to the needs of a particularly vulnerable group in Irish society. So what happened?
Nothing. No one defied the party whip. All the dissidents swallowed their personal opinions, and trooped into the Government lobby to vote for a policy they do not in fact support.
And, what is worse, no one expected anything to happen.
We have grown used to a Dáil that simply does not see itself as an independent force in Irish governance.
It would be naive, of course, to expect individual TDs to take a personal stance on all issues all the time. Parliamentary democracies need a strong sense of party cohesion if they are to function effectively. But that loyalty should not be taken for granted. If parliaments are to do their primary job of keeping governments honest, governments need to know that if they go too far on some issue, or fail too badly in some area, they will face a real revolt. In the UK, government backbenchers rebel from time to time, and policy changes. In the US, members of Congress often oppose legislation proposed by a president of their own party. In Ireland, the Dáil does what the Government wants it to do, even when most of its members think otherwise.
This points to a deeper malaise. Politicians often complain, with some justification, that the media and the public don't respect them. But the real problem is that they don't sufficiently respect themselves. A survey commissioned by the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission in 2006 found that 60 per cent of respondents did not regard the work of the parliament as important. Asked to rank its importance between one and five, where five meant extremely important and one meant not important at all, just 5 per cent chose the former option and a shocking 35 per cent chose the latter.
But if TDs don't think they're important enough to occasionally express an independent judgment, is it really surprising that the public agrees with them?
If TDs thought they mattered, they'd surely want to be sitting in full session more than three days a week and to take fewer than five months off every year. The Dáil sat for just 797 hours in 2006, down from 841 in 2004. It passed just 42 acts, down from 44. The published Dáil schedule shows that from September 26th last, when the current Dáil reassembled, to July 3rd next, when the House is due to rise for the summer, it will have sat for 93 days, 20 fewer than the average in the 1980s.
It is not as if there is no work to be done. Much important legislation, especially provisions of the annual Finance Bills, goes largely unscrutinised and is passed with little time for detailed debate.
An increasing amount of law is passed as "delegated legislation", allowing Ministers to make statutory orders, which then need only be passively laid before the House, with no provision for further debate or scrutiny. The Dáil has, moreover, allowed more and more power to be passed to essentially unaccountable government-appointed bodies.
A large proportion of public expenditure is now controlled by one or other of the 500-plus quangos over which the Dáil has virtually no control.
Most spectacularly, the HSE has taken over health spending, leaving TDs with no effective means of enforcing accountability for the single largest tranche of public spending. And when TDs try to raise issues that are theoretically within their remit, they are more often than not unable to do so. When deputies ask "private motion questions" on issues of urgent importance, they are usually ruled out of order - just a quarter of the private notice questions raised in 2006 were actually answered.
The starkest expression of the self-contempt of the Dáil is the way it has allowed even its own successes to be utterly dissipated. In 1999, when the Public Accounts Committee conducted its hearings into the Dirt scandal, citizens saw TDs from all the main parties working together in the public interest, showing real skill and intelligence and getting to the bottom of an issue more cheaply and efficiently than the tribunals. They managed to give politics a good name. Then the courts took away the powers of Dáil committees to conduct such inquiries effectively. The response of the Dáil? None whatsoever. It has done nothing by way of legislation or constitutional amendment to restore its ability to function in this way. Why should citizens believe that a parliament that so meekly allows itself to be neutered really matters to their lives?
Fintan O'Toole is an assistant editor of The Irish Times
