Monday's editorial in this paper deplored the fact that two weeks ago the Oireachtas Constitution Committee held an informal private meeting to discuss with the Minister for the Environment and myself ideas for electoral reform. It suggested that any meeting of this kind should be public.
That is of course a matter for the committee rather than for me, but I have to say that I can see nothing wrong with such an informal meeting, at which issues before the committee can be tossed around with a view to seeing how it can best proceed to address them in public session.
The electoral reform issue that was the subject of this meeting of the Constitution Committee is in fact one that has been publicly aired on a number of occasions by the Minister for the Environment and by the committee.
The basic question at issue is whether it would be possible to devise an alternative electoral system that the Dail might find worthwhile to put to the electorate that would preserve, or even enhance, the greatly-valued proportional character of our electoral system, while at the same time reducing the intra-party rivalries of our multi-seat system.
These intra-party rivalries are a matter of public and not merely party concern, because they seriously affect the quality of national political life. This is because of the exceptional pressures they put on TDs to concentrate on constituency work in order to pre-empt attempts by local rivals within their own party to displace them - work often undertaken at the expense of their national legislative role.
The intensity of the additional local pressures arising from this local intra-party rivalry may be judged from the fact that for the three-quarters of TDs who are members of the two largest parties - which field more than one candidate in each multi-seat constituency - this doubles their chances of electoral defeat.
It is hard enough to get able people to take up such a controversial and uncertain career as politics - a career in which there is a chance of losing your job on average every three years - without gratuitously doubling this risk of being found redundant at such frequent intervals.
Of course, it may well prove to be the case that even the best alternative that we can devise to our present system will be rejected either by the Oireachtas, or, even if it gets the nod from the politicians, by the electorate - because it has other negative features that seem to outweigh those of the existing system. But it seems sensible nevertheless to see whether it might be possible to offer people the possibility of such an alternative. It was with this in mind that in 1987 I included in the Fine Gael election manifesto a proposal for a change in the system. And it is the same consideration that has motivated the present Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, to put forward a similar proposal.
Because the intra-party rivalry that keeps deputies so over-concentrated on their constituencies at the expense of their legislative duties is a function of our unusual multi-seat constituency system, any worthwhile alternative must necessarily involve single-seat constituencies.
But, as we know from the British example, single-seat constituencies produce results that are not proportional to the political preferences of the electorate. With that system, the largest party will always win a disproportionate number of seats.
As an example, if Fianna Fail secured 42 per cent of the votes in a general election, it can be shown that with a simple single-seat constituency system involving the British first-past-the-post voting system they would be likely to secure 70 per cent of the seats in the Dail.
And even if our preferential (1,2,3, etc in-order-of-your-choice) system were used in single-seat constituencies, they would still be likely to secure over 60 per cent of the seats - half as many again as their "fair" share. For most of us in Ireland, the evident unfairness of such an outcome rules it out.
In order to secure proportionality with a single-seat system it would thus be necessary to hold back enough Dail seats to be filled with members from underrepresented parties, elected by some other method. And that raises two questions: How many seats would need to held back for this second tier? And, how best should the second-tier members be elected?
The suggestion that I made in the 1987 Fine Gael manifesto was that two-thirds of the seats be filled by the use of the alternative vote in single-seat constituencies, with one-third of the seats held back for a second tier.
But my subsequent study of the problem, when I was free from the responsibilities of government, showed that I had underestimated the scale of the need for balancing seats in order to secure proportionality of Dail representation. Using local election results from the smaller areas used for county council elections so as to construct 113 simulated single-seat Dail constituencies, and applying to these notional constituencies the voting patterns of the 1986 and then of the 1991 council elections, it emerged that at least 40 per cent of the seats would need to be held back in order to secure proportionality.
Any smaller proportion of second-tier seats would make it probable that Fianna Fail would secure more Dail seats in this first part of the election than they would be proportionally entitled to in the completed Dail.
(In Germany, where this type of electoral system is employed, such an eventuality is dealt with by adding extra seats to that particular Bundestag. In this country, where there is a widespread belief that we already have too many TDS, such a topping-up of ail numbers would be unacceptable.)
In a Dail of the present size this would mean there would be not more than 100 single-seat constituencies. The average size of these 100 constituencies would be just over half the size of an existing three-seat constituency.
The remaining question is how the other 40 per cent of the members would be elected. In other countries that use this mixed system, this second tier is chosen by a regional or national list system. However, it might be difficult here to get our existing TDs to vote to put to the people a system under which some 40 per cent of them who failed to get selected by their party to stand in a single-seat constituency would have their fate placed in the hands of whatever element of their national party organisation would decide their place on the electoral list. This practical obstacle to reform could, perhaps, be overcome if a substantial proportion of the 40 per cent were to be elected not from a predetermined party list, but from a list deriving from the election itself.
Thus each party's candidates who had not been elected in their single-seat constituency could be placed in order automatically, by reference to the narrowness of their defeat in their constituency - starting with the candidate who had the highest share of a quota on the final count, and working down from there.
If, for example, 25 per cent of the seats were filled in this way, then 85 per cent of the outgoing TDs would have as good a chance of being re-elected as under the present system. Indeed, because they would no longer be up against rivals of their own party, they would in some ways be better placed than now - and vulnerable to future displacement by rivals as distinct from opponents.
Allocating 25 per cent of the seats to the most narrowly defeated TDs would also greatly alleviate one consequence of the single-seat system that the Opposition parties would find difficult to accept, viz. the fact that otherwise almost all Fianna Fail TDs would tend to be elected from constituencies, while this would be true of less than half of those representing other parties.
Such an arrangement would still leave 15 per cent of the seats to be filled from a national list, this enabling parties to draw in fresh talent by a new channel. Because of the extreme localism of Irish politics some excellent candidates are effectively blocked from Dail membership by the mischance of living in an area where their party is already strongly represented.
That is an outline of one possible alternative to our present multi-seat electoral system, based on single-seat constituencies, which would ensure even greater proportionality than the present system. There may be others. What the Constitution Committee might usefully do would be to devise what it believes to be the alternative system most likely to secure the support of the Oireachtas first, and then of the electorate. If that did, in fact, secure support in the Dail, it would then be for the people to decide whether they wanted to make a change to such a system.
I believe that this is a choice that the electorate is entitled to be given.