Sir, – If Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe considers that our current system of government “broadly works”, this surely indicates that the system could be better (“Number of TDs could reach 240 over next 30 years if population growth continues, chamber hears”, News, October 16th). I would argue that this is a great opportunity to break from the “adapted” UK governmental model we currently use and consider adopting a new federal system with elected governors and strong regional parliaments for each of the provinces and Dublin.
There are roughly 1.4 million people in Leinster excluding Dublin, another 1.4 million people in Dublin, 1.3 million people in Munster, 900,000 people in Connacht/Ulster (excluding Northern Ireland). These populations provide the scale to justify regional parliaments and the provinces themselves are obvious natural groupings to segment the system.
To help decide a course of action, we could look at the structures of similar-sized countries like Austria, a country of nine million people and nine provincial parliaments. Despite having almost twice our population, Austria has just 183 members in their national council while there are 166 TDs in Dáil Éireann.
Austria operates by delegating local and regional matters, budgets, development plans and certain taxes, etc, to provincial state parliaments, each with their own elected governor. This balanced regional development and means national politicians are more focused on national policy rather than local matters. Contrast this to our Taoiseach recently bringing a memo to Cabinet on how O’Connell Street in Dublin might be revamped to rejuvenate the city (News, October 15th).
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This is the equivalent of a board of directors in a multinational company discussing what furniture to have in the office lobby! Surely this can be better executed by a local parliament and governor?
Federalism is a scalable system that works effectively in other countries and should be considered instead of bandaging up our current model.
Furthermore, if a united Ireland were to happen, a federal system across Ireland would be a more integrated approach than a watered-down confederal method.
We’re at a point in our development where we need to decide how the country will be managed as the population grows. If we’re in any doubt about federalism and want to see how our current system will function at scale, we just need to look across the water to Westminster and ask is this what we want? – Yours, etc,
CATHAL MELINN,
Whitehall,
Dublin 9.