In Minister Dempsey's speech on politics, which I wrote about last week, he made only a passing reference to electoral reform. However, a change in the electoral system is one of several reforms he has sought to introduce with the aim of diminishing the debilitating concentration of so many of our national politicians on local issues.
In multi-seat constituencies TDs from the main parties compete for seats against candidates from other parties and their own party colleagues. It is this internal party competition that has forced so many TDs to devote the greater part of their time to local issues - because failure to do so can lead to losing their Dail seats to local councillors free to spend their time working in the constituency, while for much of the year TDs have to
Our multi-seat electoral system has also made it difficult for people to gain entry to the Dail unless they have previously served on a local council. This is why for decades past only one out of every seven people entering the Dail has managed to get there without serving on a local council. And this has meant the range of experience TDs bring with them to the Dail, a body that increasingly has to deal not merely with national but also with European and international issues, is disturbingly narrow.
Moreover, the legislative process is greatly slowed because the Dail cannot do much more than a half-week's work as so many members have to attend local council meetings on Mondays. In order to protect themselves against rivals in their party they must be back working in their constituency on Fridays.
At the time of their election to the present Dail almost half - 45 per cent - of TDs were members of local councils, and apart from one or two of these appointed as new ministers, the rest retain this double political role.
This current dual-mandate figure is unusually low. In the past the proportion of TDs with such a dual mandate has normally been two-thirds or higher. However the proportion of such "double-jobbers" has recently been somewhat artificially - and perhaps only temporarily - reduced, because in the past decade we have had five different governments under four different Taoiseachs. And on appointment to ministerial posts, all the members of these five governments had to resign from local authorities.
As a result of this abnormal turnover in government ministers an astonishingly high proportion of present TDs - no less than 44 per cent - either are or have been ministers. And the great majority of these were originally members of local councils, who had to relinquish membership on appointment as ministers.
As Minister for the Environment and Local Government Mr Dempsey has floated the idea of an electoral reform under which the Dail would be composed of a majority of deputies elected by transferable vote in single-seat constituencies - the remainder being chosen by another democratic process, involving party lists. An appropriate number of each party's list would be added to the seats won by each party in the single-seat constituencies, to ensure that the final composition of the Dail would be proportionate to the first preference votes secured by each party in constituency elections.
Such a system already operates in a growing number of countries, including Germany. So far as I know we are the only State in the world which elects its parliament from multi-seat constituencies in which candidates have to contend against members of their own party as well as against those of other parties.
A proposal for a system of this kind was presented to a committee of the Dail some time ago - by Mr Dempsey and myself. It did not seem to evoke a positive response from the deputies present, despite the fact that such a reform would drastically reduce the electoral attrition of Fianna Fail deputies, two-thirds of whose defeats are at the hands of fellow party members, as well as helping Fine Gael deputies, a third of whose defeats take a similar form.
There are, perhaps, several explanations for this lack of enthusiasm for an electoral reform that would offer much more security to members of both the main parties.
Apart from the force of inertia, and an instinctive fear of change, there may also be doubts in the minds of some deputies about their chances of being elected under a new system - under which the present number of constituency seats would have to be reduced by, perhaps, two-fifths.
Under such a system the re-election of a deputy would be dependent in the first instance upon being the nominated candidate of his or her party in one of perhaps 100 small, single-seat constituencies, each of which would constitute only a part - in most cases less than half - of the area from which that deputy draws votes. Outgoing TDs who were not chosen as their party's candidate for one of the single-seat constituencies would, however, have an opportunity to be elected by the alternative route.
In most other countries with such a dual electoral system this alternative electoral process involves voting for party lists of candidates. Many TDs may not feel sure that if this kind of supplementary list system were used here their party executive would place them high enough on the party list to have a good chance of being among the number added to bring their party's strength in the Dail up to the level of the first preference votes cast for it in the country as a whole.
I have, however, suggested that these fears might easily be resolved by arranging that the party lists would not be drawn up by each party's executive but instead would be constituted automatically by those TDs who had failed to come through the constituency elections. They would be automatically placed in order on the list by reference to the proportion of the quota they had attained in the final constituency count. Such an arrangement would offer the existing TDs an excellent chance of being re-elected by the second route if they failed by the first.
Over time, as the existing TDs come to retire from the Dail, this process could, if thought desirable, be gradually modified to introduce a party list element through which the range of skills available to parties in the Dail could be broadened. I believe it would be appropriate for such electoral reform to be considered after the next election by the parties, whose members would benefit from the greater stability of such a change. The country as whole would be better served by the gradual emergence of Dail deputies who were less absorbed by the minutiae of local politics and able to give more time to national issues.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie