WITH the publication of the second set of Provisional Reports by the Constitution Review Group, relating to the Government, we have the benefit of its full thinking on the relationship between Dail, Government and President.
In the first set of these reports last December the merits and demerits of different systems of election of the Dail were considered. The Review Group expressed considerable concern about the unrepresentative character of the Dail in terms of its socio-economic and occupational composition and its gender balance.
As is widely known, only 12 per cent of Dail members are women - a figure that in European terms compares badly with all but a few very conservative countries such as Britain. What is less obvious is the fact - brought out in a table attached to the report - that fewer than a quarter of our present deputies are drawn from that vast majority of the population who are not in the relatively privileged position of being employers, managers, professional people or salaried workers. And half of this residual 25 per cent are farmers!
Some socio-economic bias is inevitable whatever the electoral system; it is the scale of the imbalance in our case that has led the Review Group to question whether our electoral system may need to be reconsidered. They point out that not only all non-PR electoral systems but also PR single transferable vote systems with small, constituency sizes - as ours has been ever since seven-seat constituencies were abolished 50 years ago - do badly in terms of the social mix of candidates. By contrast, in list systems each party list can offer a more representative mix of candidates.
The report also refers to other defects of our present electoral system: "Excessive pressure of constituency work and ... the rapid turnover of Dail membership" - the latter being a phenomenon which, as I have pointed out in this column on several previous occasions, has been increased by half in the case of Fine Gael and more than doubled in the case of Fianna Fail as a result of the displacement of sitting TDs by other candidates of their own party.
Curiously, however, the report makes no mention of one of the most striking factors that narrows access to Dail membership - the extraordinary dependence of TDs upon a base in local politics, as a protection against the danger of losing their seat to local councillors of the same party. Such councillors can spend seven days a week building up local support for a Dail candidacy - while the local TD is being required to spend half of each week in Dublin.
The distorting effect upon the Dail composition of these pressures deriving from our electoral system has been quite extraordinary. Although much the greater part of Dail time is devoted to national affairs, only one-eighth of our present deputies have felt it electorally feasible to avoid involvement in local politics. Three out of every four TDs have entered the Dail by this route, and no less than half of the remainder have felt it necessary to enter local politics after their election to the Dail, in order to protect their Dail seats against the ambitions of aspiring local councillors of their own party.
ONLY in one respect does this Dail differ from its predecessors so far as local authority member is concerned. No less than four governments with quite different compositions, between them involving all Dail parties which have more than one seat, have held office since the last local elections 41/2 years ago. These are the two Fianna Fail/PD governments led respectively (and with substantially different Fianna Fail membership) by Charles Haughey and Albert Reynolds; the Fianna Fail/Labour Government of 1992-1994; and the present tripartite Coalition.
And since after their appointment Ministers are required to resign local authority seats, during this period there has been an unprecedented outflow of Dail deputies from local authorities, with the result that of the 146 deputies who have served on local authorities two-fifths are now no longer councillors.
The fact remains that, given the quite different agendas of local and national government, an electoral system that so drastically skews parliamentary membership towards local politicians, and which imposes upon a clear majority of parliamentarians such a demanding dual political role, is clearly detrimental to the capacity of parliament to handle national and international affairs effectively and with adequate expertise.
On more than one count the case for a review of our electoral system is thus a powerful one. The Review Group has done an extremely useful job by setting out clearly and succinctly the arguments against the present system, going on to rule out non-proportional systems as undesirable, and then identifying two alternative systems as "best buys" - should the objections to the present system be felt to be "sufficiently weighty to justify considering a change from PR-STV to a new electoral system".
Which is of course a matter that has to be left to our politicians to decide in the first instance - and for the people subsequently to ratify or reject by way of referendum.
ONE of the Review Group's two "best buys" is a list system - under which probably on a regional basis, voters would choose between party lists which could be balanced socio-economically so as to favour a better mix of representatives. In view of our tradition of voters being accorded a choice as between candidates a preferential list system, under which voters could express support for one or more of the candidates on the list, would be most likely to find favour here, as it has in Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg and Greece.
The alternative to this would be an Additional Member system, a version of which was in fact proposed on my suggestion in the Fine Gael 1987 election manifesto. This system is that used in Germany, and it seems currently to be gaining in popularity, having recently been introduced in New Zealand and Japan, and having also been favoured by the British Labour Party's Plant Commission.
This system would involve electing perhaps half the Dail by preferential voting in single member constituencies and then compensating for the inevitable non-proportionality of the outcome of this vote by adding a similar number of members so as to ensure that each party has a proportional share of Dail membership.
These additional members could either come from candidates voted on in a simultaneous regional list election or could be those most narrowly defeated in the single-seat contests - which would give half the constituencies a second member from a different party.
If the first of these methods of choosing the additional members - viz, a regional list system - were to be preferred, the Review Group suggests that an opportunity to test it in advance could be provided by the next European Parliament election, for which we may be required to use such a list system.
One cannot, however, rule out the possibility that even if a momentum for electoral reform were to be generated by the publication of this Review Group Report and by the subsequent debate on this and other constitutional issues in the proposed all-party Committee of the Oireachtas, the existing deputies might be unenthusiastic about entrusting the future fate of half their number - and which half, they might reasonably wonder! - to such an unknown quantity as a list system. The alternative of selecting the additional members from those most nearly defeated in the new single-seat constituencies might be more likely to get their support - without which no reform is possible.