The Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Noel Dempsey, has recently brought in two important political reforms, tackling problems inherited from our past.
The first of these was the failure to entrench local government in the Constitution, either in 1922 or 1937; and the second was the gradual emergence within the new State of an almost total overlap of the political personnel engaged in local and national government. He is now trying to initiate a third, more radical, reform of the electoral system we inherited from the closing years of British rule.
The first of the problems just mentioned has been resolved by last month's barely noticed, and little understood, constitutional referendum, an important aspect of which has been the entrenchment of quinquennial local government elections.
Although the law has provided for local elections at five-year intervals, in the absence of any constitutional provisions on local government it has been possible for governments to postpone local government elections towards the end of a five-year term whenever they have felt that this would secure better council results for them.
This electoral slippage began in the mid-1960s, since when it has accumulated to a total of no less than nine years, effectively eliminating two out of the eight local elections that should have taken place during this time. And a side-effect of the three slippages of the past 15 years has been the loss, during the 1980s and most of the 1990s, of the alignment of local and European elections that had been secured by the national coalition government in the 1970s.
At the Paris EEC summit of 1974 I had advised Liam Cosgrave to propose that the first direct elections to the European Parliament be brought forward by two years from their proposed 1980 date. This proposal was based on a calculation that it was likely to yield a compromise of bringing forward these elections by one year, viz to 1979, the year when the next local elections were due to be held in Ireland.
This ploy worked, and thus, without any other country realising the domestic Irish rationale for the earlier date, the European elections were brought into line with the Irish local elections of that year. This secured a joint electoral turnout of 61 per cent in that year, instead of the 45 per cent or less that these two elections were both likely to secure if held separately. Unfortunately the benefits of this strategy were then lost, because some years later the government I led decided to follow the Fianna Fail precedents of the 1960s and 1970s by postponing the 1984 local elections, in the hope of a better result for the government parties a year later. This proved to be a vain hope, as I had unsuccessfully sought to persuade my cabinet colleagues at the time.
Now, because of last month's referendum, it will be constitutionally impossible to postpone local elections, and because there has been an accumulated slippage of five years since 1979, our local elections will coincide once again with the elections to the European Parliament.
Noel Dempsey's second political reform has been the recent legislation to end [N O]in the year 2004 the present almost total overlap of Dail and county council membership by 2004.
Until the 1930s there seems to have been relatively little overlap of personnel between these two levels of government. Indeed, in that early period of State formation, very many members of local authorities were not members of national political parties, although a lot of independent or ratepayers' councillors were pro-Treaty supporters of the Cumann na nGaedheal party. Understandably, an emerging Fianna Fail challenged this situation, and soon the local government system had become overwhelmingly dominated by party politics.
As the original revolutionary members of the Dail disappeared from the political scene, a gradual process which began in the late 1920s but took a full half-century to complete, their replacements were increasingly drawn from the ranks of party politicians who thus came to dominate local government.
By this gradual process local government eventually became an almost exclusive entry route to national politics. In recent times 85-90 per cent of Dail deputies are, or have previously been, members of local councils.
Such a drastic narrowing of the entry process to national politics was clearly undesirable. For, while political experience at the local level is clearly a useful attribute for some proportion of the members of a national parliament, only a minority of people who have something worthwhile to offer in politics at national level will have had both the inclination to engage in local politics and an opportunity to do so.
A further disadvantage of this aspect of our political system has been that, as a result, many of our TDs have remained focused primarily on local affairs within the area they represent. This has been especially true when, as is often the case, TDs fear being replaced in the Dail by - from within their party - local politicians who during the life of a Dail will have been free to give the whole of their energy to local matters, without the distraction of attendance at Leinster House.
In recent decades some two-thirds of Fianna Fail TDs and one-third of Fine Gael TDs who have lost their seats have been displaced in this way by colleagues from their own party, rather than by losing their seats to another party.
Given the evident unattractiveness of politics as a profession in today's world, a national political system with such a negatively skewed entry process, with such a distorted bias towards local rather than national issues, and with such an artificially high rate of attrition for members of the parliament, needs radical reform.
An earlier starting date for the elimination of the dual local and national electoral mandate would have been preferable, and would, I believe, have been preferred by the Minister himself. But the important, and remarkable, thing is that he has succeeded in securing parliamentary support for a reform that will eventually have such a radical effect on the composition of the Oireachtas itself.
There remains the problem posed by the multi-seat electoral system. By virtually doubling the rate of attrition in our elections, this system has enormously intensified concentration by TDs on their local constituencies at the expense of their legislative role.
This has raised the question of whether the electoral system might be reformed in a way that would preserve, and possibly even enhance, its proportionality while at the same time substituting single-seat constituencies for multi-seat ones.
Even with the employment of the alternative vote (1, 2, 3 etc in order of your choice rather than plumping by putting an X opposite a single name), single-seat voting systems always yield a disproportionate number of seats to the larger parties.
And, as many other countries have found, the only way in which proportionality can be secured with a single-seat electoral system is to reserve a number of seats to be filled on a different basis by allocating them in such a way as to compensate for the disproportionality of the single-seat part of the process. The practice elsewhere, in Germany, for instance, has been to fill the additional seats needed to achieve proportionality from the upper end of party electoral lists, upon which the electorate simultaneously vote, the names on these lists having been placed by each party in the order of its choice.
I believe - as, clearly, does the Minister - that there is a strong case in the national interest in favour of a change in our electoral system along these lines. And because this would involve a constitutional amendment, it would require the approval not merely of both Houses of the Oireachtas but also of the electorate. Even if approved by the Oireachtas, such a change might not be endorsed by an electorate, many of whose members may attach more value to their existing power to choose amongst each party's candidates in their constituency than to the significant benefits at national level that would accrue from such a reform.
Amongst TDs themselves there are divided views about such a change. Even if the size of the Dail were not to be simultaneously reduced, as the Minister now seems to be proposing, under such a reformed system a significant proportion of deputies would find their fate determined in future not by the electorate but rather by their placing on the list prepared by their party from which additional members would be drawn.
And even the attraction of no longer having to share a constituency with opponents and also frequently with colleagues might not be sufficient in some cases to persuade them to take a chance on such a radically different method of securing election to the Dail.
Despite these evident hazards and uncertainties, the Minister was right to bring forward this proposal for the consideration of the Oireachtas (it is at present being debated by one of its committees) and, if eventually approved by the Oireachtas, of the electorate also.
After more than three-quarters of a century of political independence it is right that our people should have the opportunity to consider an alternative form of proportional representation to the one the outgoing British government endowed us with in 1921.