Chrysalis

I listened with interest yesterday to the Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney TD discussing how his government was one of reform. He mentioned that recent changes to local government, the scrapping of Town Councils and the reduction of the number of TD’s by a whopping six proved that they have been true to their #GE11 pre-election promise. Add to this their effort to abolish the Seanad and yes I suppose it could be argued that they are making changes. But the question is, are those changes reforms? And are we now in 2013 in the middle of the ‘so called’ democratic revolution proclaimed by An Taoiseach?
By anyone’s standards (even Fianna Fail’s) it’s hard to swallow this latest government spin doctoring. If as so many of our Fine Gael representatives now believe that the Seanad has run its course and that we are in dire need of wider reform of the Oireachtas as a whole why the rush? We have a government with a massive majority, one so big they have been able to tackle the x-case legislation so why the urgency to hold the vote on the Seanad now? We will go to the poll in October and if the question is successful the Seanad will remain in place until the next election, likely late 2015 or early 2016 so what’s the rush.
I ask this question because the dreamer in me is minded to believe Simon when he says he is a reformist and so I challenge him and his colleagues to set about introducing real Oireachtas reforms before taking such crude, and pointless, strategies like Seanad abolition. I have heard the argument that we as a nation do not need as many politicians as we have, that we do not need two houses at national level. I agree to a point, yes we have too many politicians but reducing the no of TD’s by six is a mealy mouthed response.
The changes at local level too seem a little disingenuous Town Councils are gone and some County/City Council areas have been merged in an attempt to make the system more efficient but in reality without giving local authorities any real power or decision making powers nothing will change. We need to be moving to a scenario where we have strong Regional Authorities with real power and District Authorities below them again with a necessary function. With this type of approach at a regional and local level we could afford to drop the number of TD’s below 100 and still have a strong and effective national parliament. A reformed Seanad could then be made up of a cross section of citizens and regional representatives that would act as oversight and alternative voice to the new Dail.
However, what we are now facing is a situation where a heavily whipped Dail with no oversight from a second chamber will be controlled by an already powerful executive that is answerable only to the electorate every five years. By maintaining a weak local government structure national politics will be heavily insulated from attack there too. The local government reforms are doing nothing to dilute the power of un-elected City and County Managers and until that happens they will remain impotent.
So to come full circle, as the Kerryman said to the Yank, ‘You’re looking for Dingle; well I wouldn’t start from here.’ If this government want to be remembered as true reformists they need to move away in the first instance for this plan to abolish the Seanad. They need to engage with the people, possibly through the Constitutional Convention, in an open and honest way on what we as a Republic want. And they need to get serious about local government, telling us about the monetary savings made from scrapping the Seanad while expecting us to pay for almost 1000 City and County Councillors who have less power than the Managers PA is a bit rich.
The only way this will change is if people get involved in the campaign to defeat this referendum, either actively or through the ballot box and send a message to the government that YES we want change but NO not like this.