Sir, – I was very disappointed to read your Editorial, “In defence of the whip”, (June 11th).
As an American, I’m well aware of the potency of your use of the undeniably dysfunctional US system as the alternative to what we have in Ireland today. It is a great straw man. Yet I don’t believe any of us who have advocated for reform of the party whip system have called for adopting a relatively “whipless” system.
What I and others have called for is a critical re-examination of the way Irish political parties rigidly enforce the whip. A single vote against the leadership is a capital offence. How can large groups of thinking – we hope – people agree on everything? And if a party TD finds herself unable to vote as she’s told on just one issue, does that make her any less of a Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil/Labour/Sinn Féin person?
Political parties in other parliamentary democracies allow their members a greater degree of freedom, and that is what we are calling for here. Personally, I think an agreed number of free votes at the start of each Dáil term is an appealing alternative to the status quo.
In the wake of Micheál Martin’s just decision to allow his party colleagues a free vote on X case legislation, it is heartening that Fianna Fáil plans to form a committee to look at allowing more free votes on issues of conscience. I’m hopeful that the other parties will ultimately follow suit.
Moreover, anyone with significant experience of young activists in Ireland today will recognise that they are far less susceptible to “group think” than their predecessors. Those who enter politics will have no time for taking orders on how to vote on each and every issue.
As such, I suspect that, to borrow the motto of one US conservative publication, yesterday’s Editorial may, in time, be recalled as an instance of “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’.” – Yours, etc,
LARRY DONNELLY,
School of Law,
NUI Galway.