A very different Dáil

I wouldn't have expected the acute juxtaposition of Edmund Burke and Ivor Callely in the opening paragraph of a newspaper column but Fergus Finlay shows how it's done in today's Irish Examiner.  What exactly has a great political thinker got in common with a junior minister who regularly makes an arse of himself?  Answer: Absolutely nothing.  But it's an excuse for Finlay to ruminate about the quality of our representative democracy which he feels is in a very poor state.  He rightly rebuts the charge that all politicians are the same but "the one thing they increasingly all have in common is that the profession to which they belong is no longer trusted and valued by the people they represent". 

His solution is to radically redefine how parliament actually represents.  He wants the Dáil become a place where people are invited not just to be represented, but also to participate. The European Parliament has an accessible petitions system whereby people from all over Europe can ensure that an issue of direct and immediate concern to them is raised on the floor of the parliament.  Why couldn't the Dáil allow our citizens to participate in a similar way, he wonders.  Also why can't the Dáil develop its investigative role thereby holding public administration up to necessary scrutiny and avoiding costly and prolonged judicial tribunals? 

There's no reason in principle why this could not be so.  But in practise there's no real precedent for this in parliamentary systems where the executive is part of, or fused with, the legislature.  The US Congress, for all its faults, can sometimes be a remarkably open system and its powers of investigation are certainly impressive.  This is due to the important constitutional doctrine of the Separation of Powers.  The executive is institutionally separate from the legislature unlike parliamentary systems where the executive is not only part of the legislature but usually has a controlling majority that is rigorously enforced by the whip system.

In the Irish system the only people who defy the whips are maverick populists or those who go out on a limb on some particularly local issue.  Most politicians are motivated by a willingness to serve the public interest in some shape or form, even, in his own way, grandstanding idiots like Callely.  I'm not ruling out the possibility that more corrupt figures like Burke, Flynn or Lawlor won't emerge in the future but as a system Irish politics isn't corrupt so much as tarnished.  The profession of politics itself is devalued and so far there is little sign that the political class as a whole shows any need for a fundamental rethink of what it is they should actually be doing when they inhabit the parliamentary arena.

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[aidanmcnamara]

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