The overwhelming defeat of the Bill to ban hare coursing, by 125 votes to 24, was never in doubt once the Government parties applied the whip and Sinn Féin declared its opposition. The margin, however, tells us little about the state of opinion in the Dáil, and still less about opinion in the country.
Hare coursing is an issue of serious and principled disagreement. It is often portrayed as a division between rural and urban dwellers, and there is some truth in that. Coursing clubs are woven into the social fabric of many rural communities, and their members resent what they see as condescension from those who know little of their way of life. But polling suggests no clean urban-rural divide exists. At heart, though, this is an ethical question about what may acceptably be done to a wild animal for sport, and reasonable people in every constituency may disagree about the answer.
That is why the refusal of a free vote was unfortunate. The Taoiseach explained that, in the Government parties, votes of conscience are permitted only on human life issues. That definition is extremely narrow by international standards. In Westminster, free votes have traditionally extended to ethical questions of many kinds, and the ban on hunting with dogs, the closest British parallel to this week’s vote, was itself decided on a free vote. Australia, New Zealand and Canada allow conscience votes across an even wider range of subjects, while German parliamentarians enjoy a constitutionally protected free mandate.
Observers have long remarked on the rigidity of whipping in the Dáil compared with other parliaments. The picture is more complicated than sometimes suggested, since party cohesion is high in most European legislatures, but the scope for free votes on matters of conscience is unquestionably narrower here than almost anywhere else. That is regrettable. It limits the space for vigorous and well-informed debate, obliges deputies to vote against their stated convictions, and injects an unnecessary partisanship into areas of policy where none need exist.
