As both Houses of the Oireachtas reassemble this week, they do so almost ignored by the mass of the Irish people, writes Feargal Quinn.
Most of the media, with the honourable exception of The Irish Times, pay the proceedings little attention, except for the choreographed rows and the pointers they provide to the next general election.
As a convinced parliamentarian, I feel this is a bad thing. By parliamentarian I mean someone who believes, in accordance with our Constitution, that the Oireachtas should be central to the business of running the country. Over the past 20 years this has become less and less so. There are four main reasons:
Taken together, these influences combine to make our parliament less and less relevant to the day-to-day concerns of ordinary citizens.
One of the reasons I believe this trend to be bad is that it moves the process of government out of sight of the public. Whatever you may say against our parliament, at least it is fully open to the public gaze - but the alternatives that have taken over our decision-making in recent years all happen behind closed doors.
Nowhere is this more true than with legislation. Each year the Oireachtas passes about 40 bills, all of which affect our lives. But parliamentary discussion of these measures is usually perfunctory, because it comes after all the main decisions have already been taken.
For instance, social partnership agreements often spell out the broad lines of future government legislation, something I totally agree with. But in most cases, when the details of legislation are introduced to parliament, it is in the form of a package that has already been negotiated with the social partners. Amend-
ments are therefore resisted for fear of upsett-
ing a done deal.
A parallel happens with EU legislation. Many bills that come before the Oireachtas are to transpose into Irish law matters that have long since been decided at European level, where the only influence we have has been exercised by ministers and more often by civil servants. Any latitude that EU legislation leaves to the national level is usually agreed privately with interested parties in advance of the Bill being brought to parliament. Again, the rubber stamp applies.
A third type of pre-emption - perhaps the most sinister - comes from professional lobbyists, a breed that has grown alarmingly both in numbers and influence in recent years.
The main thrust of their work is to influence, not the members of the Oireachtas as such, but the decision-makers in government - at both political and administrative level. They work almost always out of the public eye. And, again, the die is cast before the matter reaches parliament.
All three types of erosion in parliamentary influence arise with at least the collusion of government, if not its actual encouragement. For all the lip-service they pay to the notion of parliamentary democracy, when in government politicians of all stripes, with some notable exceptions, tend to regard parliament as a nuisance, and a threat to their freedom to act as they please. Civil servants encourage this attitude, as they find it easier to control a handful of ministers than the more than 200 Oireachtas members.
It is in the national interest to stop this decline in the influence of parliament. Some quite simple but far-ranging changes in procedure would do the trick. First, as far as EU legislation is concerned, we need to step up still further the level of parliamentary scrutiny given to European affairs. The key here is how early the parliament gets involved. One of the key decision-making forums within the EU is the weekly gathering of Coreper, which brings together each member state's permanent ambassador to Brussels.
Some countries, notably Denmark, recognise the key importance of this meeting and discuss its agenda in advance in a parliamentary committee. Our only equivalent to this is a last-minute "heads-up" for the Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs before meetings of the Council of Ministers, at a time when many things have already been decided.
At the domestic level, we could address both the social partnership issue and the professional lobbying problem through the same initiative - a rule that would insist that all pre-legislative manoeuvring takes place in parliament rather than outside it. Everybody should be free to make submissions about upcoming legislation, but only in public and only in parliament.
This could be done by holding pre-legislative hearings in parliamentary committees, or by transforming the Seanad into a national forum for the preliminary discussion of legislative proposals. By bringing the legislative process back into the full light of day, we can help to revive the public interest in the political process that is so essential to a healthy democracy.
Feargal Quinn is an independent member of Seanad Éireann. www.feargalquinn.ie