Madam, - The new Government represents another triumph for the great deal-maker, and a significant opportunity for the Greens to make their presence felt. It is a surprisingly good outcome of a very flawed system of government formation, whereby individual deputies can be bought off with locally-biased inducements.
Just as the most obvious coalition configuration of FF-FG cannot yet be seriously considered (for archaic and perverse reasons), the other option which is never entertained is that of all-party coalition. It is dismissed because our model of parliamentary democracy is assumed to require an "opposition". Once the deal is done, however, the latter is, in reality, neutered and ineffective.
Yet just as the Dáil represents all the people of Ireland, so too the government should represent, not some concocted combination of numbers which represents just 50 per cent and a bit, but the entire Dáil. Let us hope, therefore, that the new FF/GP/PD coalition will ask the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution to consider a new system of governance - an all-party coalition on the lines of the Swiss system, and, indeed, similar to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation.
The advantages would be several. It would mean (a) that the adversarial nature of politics would be replaced by a more inclusive milieu; (b) that small parties and individual TDs would never exercise more power than is their representative due; (c) that for as long as the Greens have their present or even greater numbers of TDs, they will always be in government (and not just when the mathematics of the Dáil lands in their favour); and (d) that when an eventual political settlement is reached for the whole island, the unionists who currently number 20 per cent of the population will gain 20 per cent representation, not only in parliament, but also in government (rather than what they fear: being in permanent opposition).
In a word, then, just as the people elect the parliament by proportional representation, so too the parliament should elect its government by PR. Doubtless, the outcome would be a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach and a Fine Gael Tánaiste, along with other individual TDs elected to those ministries for which, in the consensus of the Dáil, they have the most talent. - Yours, etc,
PETER EMERSON, Ballysillan Road, Belfast 14
PHIL KEARNEY, Richmond Road, Dublin 7