The Why and How of Dail Reform

Maurice Manning watches the 1982 election count, in which he was elected TD for Dublin North East.

That the Dail is in recess until October is seen by most people who bother to think about it, as little less than a scandal. The fact - and it is a fact - that most TDs wiII take as short a holiday as most other people and will spend the rest of the recess time working on constiituency matters and, in many cases, doing research on forthcoming legislation, does not change this picture. What is important is what is seen, and politicians may be annoyed at being mis-represented, but they can hardly blame the public for its perception.

The fact that the Dail is out of session for such a long period is only one symptom of a' deeper malaise and of a curious insensitivity on the part of many otherwise connscientious politicians. More serious is not just the yawning credibility gap between many politicians and the general public, but the generalised loss of belief in the ability of politicians to come to grips with the real problems facing our society. In addition there is growing irritation with the role-playing which leads politicians to say almost diamettrically opposite things when they move from Government to Opposition, or vice versa.

All parties at present - and this more than most includes that party which so loudly professes its ideological purity and consistency, The Workers' Party - have backyards littered with opportunistic polity turns and about-faces. If the politicians can't see this, the public certainly can.

Ordinary politicians, especially back benchers, may well argue in despair that there is little they can do to change the situation. They see little possibility for themselves of influencing policy in any way, and they can point to t11(; well-chronicled growth of Cabinet Government, the inncreasing power of the Civil Service, the emergence of strong, powerful pressure groups, and they can point to the enorrmous burden of constituency work which the public more and more demands of its TDs, and which in fairness some TDs themselves and an unsatisfactory electoral system encourages.

All of this is true, and for these and other reasons poliiticians have more and more found themselves side-tracked into a peripheral role. and in the process, have dropped to a new low in public esteem. Some politicians will shrug their saoulders and say the situation was always like this and that all one can do is to work hard at retaining one's seat and hope to influence policy in whatever small way »ossible. Such an approach, however, is not alone defeattist. but will ensure that the central role, which is the right of politicians in a parliamentary democracy, will never be restored to them.

It would be foolish to talk of such a central role being restored in the ncar future. But if politicians are serious about it, there are a number of ways open to them straight away, which will both signal their sincerity and seriousness in this matter and will also give them much greater innfluence over policy and over the behaviour of the Governnment and bureaucrats in the short to middle term.

There is nothing whatsoever to prevent politicians of all parties demanding that the procedures and the operaation of the Dail itself be updated and that this be done with all haste and urgency. The truly extraordinary fact is that the biggest obstacle to parliamentary reform is the absence of pressure from the members themselves. No Goverriment is going to lightly take up the job of reformming the structures of the Dail, as Governments generally don't like to be bothered by a vigorous, probing, indeependent legislature. But Governments depend on that same legislature and if the pressure is there, Governments will respond arid respond quickly.

It is significant that only two politicians in the past decade have paid any really serious attention 'to the quesstion of parliamentary reform: Barry Desmond in 1973 and more recently, John Bruton. In fairness it must be said that Bruton in Government did try to re-organise the arrchaic financial procedures, and his booklet "A Better Way to Plan the Nation's Finances", represents a genuine atttempt to restore some sort of meaningful Dail accounttability over public spending, and an attempt to stop Govvernments publishing misleading estimates of expenditure. It is also significant that the present Government has no interest whatsoever in implementing the Bruton proposals. And apart from Barry Desmond and John Bruton, no serious thinking has been done by politicians on this question, though in fairness too, neither have the universities nor the media contributed much.

But straight away, in the coming session of the Dail, there are a number of reforms which could easily be introduced without any great difficulty, that is if memmbers of the Dail are serious about reform, and if they accept that what they face is a crisis of public credibility. In other words if they don't take themselves seriously then they can't expect those outside to do so either.

In the short term, a determined attempt could be made to bring in the following, much-needed reforms:

Reform of the Dail Timetable (which is now totally out of date). The 13 week recess from July to October merely highlights this need. Clearly a long break suits Governments more than it suits the ordinary deputy since it enables the Government to escape detailed probing on its activities and its policy. For example, it wasn't an accident that the Government introduced its recent pay curb in the Public Sector during the recess. And Governments traditionally use the non-sitting period to introduce measures which should properly be scrutinised and examined in the House itself. In addition, the over-long recess misses the purpose of the Dail which is not to make life easy and convenient for the Government of the day. And there is something totally inappropriate about a lengthy Dail recess, following on a period of frenetic legislative activity, where bills are guillootined through, as happens in the last weeks of every session, without the possibility of detailed debate, or at times, of even the Committee Stage being properly taken.

Attention too must be given to the hours the Dail sits.

There is no reason why Friday sittings (perhaps without votes being taken) should not become a regular feature.

An Extended Question Time. The present Question Time procedure is overloaded and cumbersome. Part of the pressent problem lies with selfish or publicity-seeking TDs, who hog the available time and insist on followingup their own supplementaries at inordinate length. In the last session, there was a huge backlog of questions, many of which were on the Order Paper for 3 or 4 months before being answerred. In many cases, by the time the question was reached, it had ceased to have any urgency or relevance. Even at pressent it should be possible to have ail extra hour-and-a-half a week for •. questions - for example, to have a question period from 2pm to 3.30pm each day. After all, Question Time is one of the few weapons open to the back benchers. On a positive side, it must be said that under Dr. John O'Connell, back benchers have far greater freedom to probe and examine than ever before.

Broadcasting of the Dail. This would at least remove some of the remoteness which surrounds Dail procedures and help those outside to hear what is happening, and at least introduce a new level of much-needed communication beetween the Parliament and the electorate. There is no reason why broadcasting should not go ahead. We are the only parliamentary democracy in the world at the present time which does not have broadcasting of Parliament, and as all parties are agreed in principle, there seems to be no good reason why it couldn't start straight away.

In the past, RTE expressed its enthusiasm for this type of broadcasting, and it should now be taken at its word.

A Proper Committee System. This is a major and obvious reform. Any parliament worth its salt has a series of standding parliamentary committees to which many bills are reeferred for detailed consideration. These committees have many advantages. They take technical work off the floor of the House, thus making room for more elaborate disscussion on general issues or on issues which would never otherwise reach the floor of the House. The committees allow members to specialise, and the committee atmosphere breaks down many artificial party divisions and a consensus solution can more easily be arrived at. But these committtees must have the right to send for civil servants and to ask for files and to question the background to legislation, as well as the legislation itself. Even though other countries have found that these committees have many imperfections, the experience has been that they do allow the ordiinary Member of Parliament to have some influence over the formulation of policy, and allow access to information which is not easily obtained at present.

Equally important, under the heading of a committee system, is the need to have a much stronger committee on semi-state bodies, so that the daily activities, especially in the areas of borrowing and spending of the state-sponsored bodies can be more rigorously scrutinised, so that the huge losses on CIE, NET, Aer Lingus and others can be properly examined in Parliament.

Greater Flexibility in Raising Issues of Current Importance. At present, the Dail is very slow to react in a major controoversy and it is virtually impossible to recall the Dail during the recess. It should not be impossible to devise a means within the Dail whereby time is easily made available when a matter of current importance demands that a debate be held.

Most important of all, however, should be the setting up of an all-party committee to make a root and branch study of the. workings of the Dail and Seanad. This has not been done since the foundation of the State, and it is ironic that politicians, who urge other institutions to become more efficient, are so reluctant to look at their own proocedures and institutions. An all-party committee is often a recipe for dodging an issue and doing nothing, but in this case the sincerity and the will of politicians to face up to their own role in society will be judged. It may well be that this committee would urge that many procedures reemain as they are, but at least the reasons why they so reemain could be spelled out and justified, rather than as at present, where many of the reasons are obscure and shrouuded in the mists of time.

There is one other reform on which all politicians should find common agreement, and do so quickly. That is the way in which by-elections are run at present, in other words, the way in which they have got completely out of control. There isn't much case for following the French model, which practically bans by-elections, but there is a case for putting them back into perspective. At the present time, enormous sums of money are spent, Governments virtually take up residence in the constituency, unnecessary public spending promises are made and if the Dail is in session, it is virtually abandoned as TDs are obliged to spend weeks on end in the constituency.

There is no reason why limits should not be put on the amount spent by each party, or no reason why agreement shouldn't be reached between the parties that the elections be run by the local,' and not the national, organisations. This would allow the other Deputies and Ministers to do the work they are elected to do, and almost certainly, would not significantly alter the outcome of the election.