Referendum debates must be meaningful again

It's clear from the latest referendum debacle that the system cobbled up in response to the McKenna judgment in the Supreme Court is not working. The chorus of 109,066 spoiled votes is an eloquent expression of discontent with that system. But what can we put in its place?

The matter is urgent because we are now poised on the brink of a wholesale overhaul of the Constitution that will involve many referendums over the next five years.

If we do not get the referendum process right, this constitutional revision will undermine democracy rather than enhance it.

The fundamental problem about referendums is engaging public attention. People find them boring

This is due to their subject-matter and the wording put to the voters.

There is certainly work we could do on the ballot paper itself, to make the nature and intent of the choice being offered to the people more transparent.

The ballot must, of course, be legally correct, but we should also accept the need to make it communicate effectively to lay people.

However, the real problem about referendums is the nature and quality of the public debate they provoke.

Sometimes a constitutional amendment can be genuinely uncontentious, almost technical in its import.

It hardly matters that in such cases no harm is done by asking the people to rubber-stamp a change, without much debate. An example would be the need to alter all the present references to the President as "he".

On other occasions, it can happen that the entire political establishment is agreed on the change - but nonetheless it is a matter which needs a full public airing before the voters decide. A recent example was the bail amendment: no one in the Oireachtas was against it, so there was effectively no debate.

There was opposition to it outside, with arguments that deserved to be heard, but they were not adequately heard because all the political parties were on the same side. (I say this as a strong supporter of the amendment.) Ideally, from a democratic point of view, every constitutional amendment would provoke strong disagreement between political parties, who would then go on the road to gather support for their respective views.

In reality, constitutional amendments are increasingly uncontentious as far as the political parties are concerned: the opposition to them comes from groups either on the fringe of politics or outside politics altogether.

We must recognise that the needs of democracy are not satisfied by achieving agreement among the political parties. The needs of democracy can be served only where there is forceful public debate on both sides.

However, it's now clear that forceful debate is not provided, or even stimulated, by the ludicrous device of tombstone-like newspaper advertisements, which put to the public legalistically-phrased pro-and-con arguments. This is not to criticise the Referendum Commission, which does the job it was set up to do.

But it was a purely legal response to a legal problem; instead, we need a democratic response to that problem.

We're unlikely to get that response by putting an onus on RTE to balance all referendum coverage 50:50 between pro and con, as the High Court has already decreed and the Supreme Court may soon uphold.

People make judgments partly on the basis of the weight of support behind a viewpoint. A 50:50 regime could elevate out of all proportion the respectability of a lunatic fringe. Such a fringe has a right to be heard, but no right to have the State promote a quite misleading picture of its credibility.

Where are we to look for an answer? Reinstating the Government's right to promote one side of the argument is certainly not the place. Neither is it, I suggest, merely a matter of taking the money we now give the Referendum Commission and passing it to "civic associations" to fund promotional campaigns.

Instead, the answer may lie in funding both political and non-political organisations to stimulate forceful debate. Perhaps we should give funds, duly ring-fenced, to the political parties with the proviso that they must take part in public debate, though on which side would be entirely up to them. The amount the parties get could be in proportion to their elected strength.

The amount the non-political groups get could be determined by examining how much they would need to make their voice effectively heard on the particular issue, given the involvement of the particular parties and the presence or absence of political consensus on one side of the issue. There could be qualification criteria to stop a tennis club, for example, from applying for funds.

However, whatever mechanism is arrived at, it is surely imperative that we recognise the problem and look urgently for agreement on a better way forward.

Otherwise we will slowly but surely undermine one of our system's greatest democratic strengths - which is that only the sovereign people can change the basic rules of the game.

Feargal Quinn is an Independent member of Seanad Eireann.