Apologies, only the first paragraph of my 6.53pm comment is addressed to yourself.

It’s not right of you to be putting the words that you did into my mouth when you wrote “you’re saying that because it is our system we shouldn’t ever change it and Heaven help us if we were to use anything that is used across the water?” My subtext was that we are an independent state and theredore we make our own decisions for our own reasons, subject to the obligatiosn we agree to under international treaties.

As far as I’m aware the Seanad scrutinises all primary legislation, which usually includes within it the powers for ministers to make secondary legislation.

Surely the the of a government’s performance is how it has measured up against its own programme for government and its legislative programme.

I don’t see how you can with any credibility at all draw comparisons between the federal assemblies in Washington and the Oireachtas. Underlying your aomplaints is the notion that you don’t like or don’t agree with the eemocratic decisions of the Irish electorate and the governments they have elected.

Dan, your comaprison is weak given that the executive in the US is the President who addresses the assembled representatives once a year.

We have as an independent citizenry a responsbility to continually test our structures and institutions to ensure they are doing the job they are supposed to do. Otherwise, we’re simply giving ourselves over to a new elite and that wouldn’t be very republican of us now would it?

Quite the opposite, I protest. My post was making the valid and reasoned point that many in this country continue to fall, perhaps unconsciously, into the old habit of knocking Irish independence, its institutions, and the decisions of those democratically elected institutions, by invidious comparison with the oddity to our east.

But rejecting something just because it’s the way them across the water to it strikes me as a little silly. We do some things better than them, some things worse and there’s no shame in taking the elements of their system that work better than ours and using them. But the same goes for ideas we could borrow from many countries.

For instance, one of the flaws in our system is the fact that very little real debate happens in the Dáil; what little there is is overwhelmed by the vast number of pre-scripted speeches and monologues. Is it fair and reasonable to compare this element of our political system to that of other countries, even if one of those countries is “the old enemy”? I think so.

Your post, I’m afraid, is an example of how this country still hasn’t managed to mature politically: we still feel the need to define ourselves in opposition to the UK rather than developing an identity of our own.

“When the ritual annual complaint goes up that our legislature is lazy and our executive unaccountable because our Dáil sits for fewer days each year than the United Kingdom’s House of Commons does, I ask myself ‘what is the subtext of that whinge?’.”

Actually, part of the compliant is that we pass less legislation that other jurisdictions. And we have a pretty weak committee system and the executive isn’t very accountable by any standards.