Fine Gael’s ‘New Republic’

Would you really want to live in Fine Gael’s ‘New Republic’?

According to the version leaked to the Irish Times, in this brave new world, the Senate will be abolished. The number of Dail deputies elected in the traditional way by PR-STV will be reduced to 146. But there will be the ultra-TD elite – a group of 15 elected via a list system from four regional constituencies, based on the existing European constituencies, bringing the total number to 161. The President’s term of office will be reduced from seven to five years, but emigrants living abroad for more than five years will have the right to vote in Presidential elections.

Four Dail Committees will have constitutional status – the Finance Committee, a new Budget Committee, a new Banking and Regulation Committee and an EU Affairs Committee. The ‘Abbeylara’ decision that prevents Oireachtas Committees operating in a quasi-judicial role will be reversed and the number of overall Dail Committees reduced from 19 to nine.
There’s something for everyone in the audience too: . “We believe that citizens must have a direct way, between elections, to make their concerns known. Our proposal will oblige the Dáil to consider a particular issue on receipt of a public petition that has the signatures of a minimum number of citizens, eg 10,000,” according to the Irish Times version of the document.

Problems have emerged within the FG parliamentary party about the Ultra-TDs, it is said. A proposal for female candidate quotas has already been thrown out following a revolt led by Lucinda Creighton at a meeting last week.

Publication of the leaked document’s main contents by the Irish Times, though, shores up the intent of the leadership. Within a year of taking office as Taoiseach, Enda Kenny will call a ‘Super-Referendum’ day to push through this “most ambitious programme for political reform since the 1930s”.

If he does, and that all depends on his becoming Taoiseach and preferably in a Fine Gael majority government, even at that he may fall flat on his face. If Taoiseach Enda Kenny is heading up a coalition involving the Labour Party, then he may well have to water down his ambitions to suit his government partners. After that, with whatever  bits of his package survive a coalition scissors, he may not find the electorate quite so compliant as he would like them to be, especially not in a referendum that would involve voting through a number of complex and controversial reforms as one package.

The Senate is a disgrace, but that doesn’t mean that people will vote to abolish it completely. Fine Gael may be underestimating the political difficulties to which that particular proposal could give rise.

An elite group of 15 Ultra-TDs may not prove all that popular either.

Who would select the candidates for the list? Party apparatchiks and back-room boys? Why should people vote in favour of a drift towards a party centred system of political representation? And, as a seasoned political warrior put it at the weekend, who would be the real people’s representatives in the Dail, the 15 chosen by their party organizations or those ordinary TDs who’ve had to slog it out in the competitive arena of normal constituencies? Do we really want, or need, fifteen George Lees swanning around Leinster House convinced of their own superiority, a two tier TD system to match our two-tier health and every other two tier system we’re already suffering from?

The logic of reducing the term of Presidential office from seven to five years is also difficult to fathom. In practical terms it makes very little difference if our largely ceremonial President is in office for five or seven years, except that with a seven year term the office inevitably straddles the Oireachtas electoral cycle. Thus the President is a stabilizing force in our democracy and unless FG have a very good reason for changing it, it’s an institution that might well be left alone.

While there is definitely a case for abolishing several of the existing Oireachtas  Committees, given the regular carry-on at some meetings and the florid displays of political partisanship, any case for giving constitutional status to four of them should make for interesting reading.

The Petitions proposal is presumably designed to convey the notion of public participation in the parliamentary process, bringing the Dail closer to the people and all that jazz. Yet is creates an uneasy feeling. As it is, within our political culture there is already plenty of opportunity for engagement with one’s public representatives. This petitions idea appears to have been borrowed from the 1m signatures Lisbon Treaty measure for the European Parliament Petitions’ Committee. The EU has 500 million citizens, the Irish electorate is about 2 million. What may (or may not) work on the larger scale could be disastrous on a much smaller scale. Do we really need the parliamentary equivalent of the Joe Duffy show?

Fine Gael and Enda Kenny may be rushing their fences. Kenny is making a political mistake in talking about pushing through his reform agenda via a Super-referendum within a year of taking office. That smells of single party diktat, not the vision of political leadership he would like to present it as.

If this really is the formula for a ‘New Republic’ then it will need a large measure of consensus across the political spectrum if any of it is going to work. Each of its elements must be fully thought through, examined and argued before any such package is laid before the general electorate for decision. Otherwise, it will be rejected, and rightly so.

UPDATE; 23 March – the official version is now available on FG’s website. The list system proposal and the ‘petitions’  concept appear to have fallen by the wayside following the debate at FG’s  Conference last weekend. On Morning Ireland, Labour’s Eamon Gilmore promised that his party will be bringing forward its own electoral reform package sometime in the future, presumably after they’ve drafted one.