Eamon Gilmore is gone; he will not be missed by the vast majority of Irish citizens.
He operated easily within our corrupt political/administrative system.
He leaves mainstream politics with the majority of the citizens he pretended to represent a great deal worse off.
On the 18 August 1991, 23 years ago, Gilmore had an article published in the Irish Times calling for Dail reform.
We can see from the article that Gilmore, just like the rest of our politicians, knows very well what needs to be done to improve governance for the good of all citizens.
We can also see that, instead of actually acting on his own proposals, he opted for the more comfortable and lucrative life of a gombeen politician.
The dysfunctional Dail he wrote about in 1991 is still just as corrupt, just as dysfunctional.
His career is nothing more than an insignificant footnote.
18 August 1991
Eamon Gilmore
Irish Times
The Dail – a failed political entity in need of reform
Interest groups come to lobby it. School children come to look down at it. Television cameras have begun to broadcast it. Most people believe that the Dail is where the laws are made and where the Government is made accountable to the public.
But the reality is very different. The Dail is becoming redundant.
For 40% of the year it does not meet at all. For the remainder, we have a two and a half day week.
Output is low. Procedures are archaic. The Government treats it with contempt. And most TDs spend as little time as possible in the Dail chamber. The National Agenda – unemployment, crime, the North, European Union – gets a better airing in the pubs around the summer schools than in the national parliament.
Unless the Dail is reformed people will rightly see it as irrelevant. They will stop voting, just as happened at the recent local elections when the public lost confidence in their ineffective County Councils.
Dail reform has been talked about for a long time, but nothing has been done.
The Fianna Fail/PD programme for Government promised “to bring forward detailed proposals for the reform of the Oireachtas by the end of 1989.” Two years later, there are still no Government proposals.
A sub-committee of the Committee on Procedure and Privileges recommended some minor changes, but these have made matters worse.
“Priority Questions”, for example take the bite out of question time as ministers get an easy ride from mediocre Fine Gael questions.
So what must be done to transform the Dail?
Let us make a clean break with the colonial parliamentary baggage which was inherited at independence. The Dail is a hand-me-down copy of Westminster, with quaint procedures, dated language and a public-school style of debate.
It is time to make a fresh start, with new standing orders, a modern round-table approach to discussing the issues, and electronic voting which will reduce the time wasted on “divisions”.
Take legislation. In theory all TDs are legislators. In practice only ministers and Ministers of State can claim the title.
Government backbenchers can never propose a Bill, and while opposition TDs can circulate bills, there is not enough private members’ time to debate them and anyway they are defeated by the Government’s superior numbers.
Why should the Government control 80% of Dail time and dictate the agenda? Additional private members’ time could easily be found by extending Dail sitting times and there is no reason why reforming legislation, which does not require finance, cannot be advanced by individual TD.
The Government’s attitude to the Dail is increasingly contemptuous. Most major ministerial announcements are now made to press conferences outside the Dail and TDs are then prevented from pursuing the issue because of the absurd rule that “the legislation was not promised in the house.”
A simple change to standing orders would remedy that, by enabling TDs to question ministers about legislation whether it was promised in Leinster House or across the road in Buswell’s.
Most of the laws which now affect the daily lives of the people do not get discussed at all in the Dail. Your taxes and social welfare payments for example are rarely debated because the Finance and Social Welfare Bills are usually guillotined. The Local Government Bill was passed with only four of its 55 Sections examined.
Controversial bills are now usually published only at the last minute and then rushed through the Oireachtas in order to minimise public controversy.
Legislation like the Broadcasting Bill, the Local Government Bill and the Social Welfare Bill are published on a Thursday, the second stage debate is started on the following Tuesday and the Committee and final stages taken the week after that. So the opposition has little or no time to examine the Bill and interest groups outside the Dail have no time to organise themselves.
None of the hundreds of ministerial regulations which are made every year are ever debated in the Dail. Recent examples are the regulations to control dangerous dogs and the regulation banning smoky coal.
This style of government by ministerial diktat is likely to increase, because most of the primary legislation which is now passed by the Dail is “enabling” legislation, allowing ministers to make rules which will never have to be debated in parliament. It is a very secret system of law making.
Government accountability to the Dail is minimal. Each minister replies to Dail questions only three or four times per year. Even then, only about 10% of the Oral Questions which are tabled are ever answered in the Dail chamber.
Many of these are on matters about which the minister clearly knows nothing and is simply reading the civil servant’s prepared script. Since a Minister for Education, for example, can’t be expected to know about every school building and teacher in the country, why not have a two-tier system of questioning – one tier directly to senior civil servants about routine administrative matters, and the second addressed to a minister on general and policy matters on which she/he would be expected to answer without constant reference to the little pink file.
Politicians, who are now arguing that a change in the electoral system would improve Parliamentary performance, should first examine the failings of the Dail.
Legislative output would be greatly enhanced by having the Dail week on a normal five-day, year-round basis. There is understandable resistance to this from deputies who are based outside Dublin, but there is a solution – votes, especially if there were electronic voting, could be confined to two or three days of the week.
There is no good reason why the Dail, and especially its committees, should always meet in Dublin. Why not rotate the venues around the country?
The pretence at legislation and accountability which now characterises Dail Eireann cannot continue much longer. Politicians who cannot (or will not) reform their own jaded parliament cannot be expected to reform the country.
Copy to:
Eamon Gilmore
Labour Party