Recently there has been some renewed debate about our form of proportional representation, the origins of which lie in the British reaction to the victory of Sinn Féin in the 1918 Westminster general election, when 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the Westminster parliament were won by Sinn Féin candidates with 47 per cent of the votes.
That was what led the British government in 1921 to substitute our present form of proportional representation in multi-seat constituencies, using preferential voting - and the independent Irish State has ever since preserved this unusual electoral system.
However, proportional voting in 40-plus constituencies does not always produce a proportional parliament. In the last Dáil, Fine Gael secured 12 fewer seats than would have been warranted by its share of the national vote.
Moreover, this electoral system has a seriously distorting effect on our political system because it makes the electoral survival of our parliamentary representatives much more dependent on close involvement with their constituencies than is normal in most other states.
This is because the multi-seat constituency system places about three-quarters of TDs in a competitive situation vis-a-vis members of their own parties at each election. By contrast, in a single-seat system, unless members of parliament prove seriously unsatisfactory to their party's constituency organisation, they can normally count on being re-selected.
They can thus, without fear for their political survival, concentrate on parliamentary duties - or, if members of a government, can devote themselves single-mindedly to the responsibilities of their office.
There is little public understanding of the fact that many of our TDs are much more vulnerable to defeat at the hands of rivals within their own party than to defeat by their political opponents. Of 57 Fianna Fáil TDs who lost their seats in the last six general elections, 19 were defeated by opposition deputies, but almost twice as many - 35 - lost to rivals within their own party!
Fine Gael has also been affected by this phenomenon, although less severely, but it does not normally apply to smaller parties which usually present a single candidate in each constituency that they choose to contest.
One might have thought that the Fianna Fáil Dáil members, who suffer most from this particularly cruel political system, would favour a reform that would reduce by two-thirds the danger of their losing their seats. Far from this being the case, they have shied away from contemplating an alternative single-seat system that would also greatly reduce the number of constituents that they, and indeed all TDs, would have to persuade to vote for them.
Twice in the past 20 years I have personally proposed the possibility of greatly reducing unnecessary career instability affecting three-quarters of our TDs, whilst also diminishing their constituency workload.
Thus, in 1987 I included in the Fine Gael manifesto a proposal that would have provided an opportunity of securing such an outcome. When Fianna Fáil formed a government in the aftermath of that election, this Fine Gael proposal offered the prospect of a large Dáil majority for such a reform - but Fianna Fáil did not take advantage of that opportunity.
Then, 13 years later, when a reforming minister for local government, Noel Dempsey, proposed the same electoral reform that I had offered in that manifesto, I joined him in a private capacity in recommending that Dáil deputies adopt it. However, when we met the relevant parliamentary committee, our joint suggestion was without hesitation dismissed by all concerned.
What are the key features of the alternative proportional electoral system that our politicians dismissed so summarily?
It would be a variant of the system employed in Germany and a number of other countries, and in our case would involve the election of about three-fifths of the members of the Dáil by preferential voting in 100 or so single-seat constituencies. (This is, of course, the electoral system that we use in all our byelections.)
Such a system used on its own in a general election would very much favour the largest party - which is why our electorate rightly rejected it twice in referendums in 1958 and 1969.
In order to secure a Dáil proportionately representative of electoral opinion under this system, it would be necessary to elect simultaneously, by a parallel electoral system, a second set of politicians from which would be drawn those additional deputies needed to secure for each party a Dáil membership that would be strictly proportional. This is, of course, not provided by the present, allegedly proportional, representation system.
How would that second set of TDs be chosen? In Germany this is done using a list system: in other words, each party puts forward a second list of candidates in order of preference, from which is drawn whatever additional members may be needed to give each party a parliamentary membership proportional to their popular vote.
However, amongst Irish people there exists a strong commitment to local, as against national, representation. And if it were desired to maintain this local aspect of our political system, that could be achieved by drawing these additional members instead from amongst the TDs most narrowly defeated on the final count in the single-seat constituencies.
This would mean that up to two-thirds of the constituencies would end up with two TDs, normally to be drawn from different parties.
(I would personally prefer that, instead of all these additional TDs being thus elected in one or other way from local constituencies, some proportion of them would come from lists drawn up by their parties, as this would provide an opportunity for them to bring into the Dáil a small number of TDs with particular expertise. But that would be an optional extra).
Among the advantages of such a system would be that:
1. It would relieve TDs of the current risk most of them face of being defeated by members of their own parties as well as by opponents from other parties. That would free them to give much more attention to their neglected legislative role and would place them under less pressure to spend most of their time servicing their constituents rather than being engaged in the legislative process.
2. This reduction in emphasis on constituency work, which currently reduces the capacity of the Dáil as a legislative body, would be greatly reinforced by the fact that with 100 rather than 40-odd constituencies, the local workload of each TD would be reduced by 60 per cent.
3. Finally, Dáil membership would be more proportional, and thus more fair, than is the case with the present system, which, as we have recently seen, can leave a party short of up to one-third of the members that its popular vote would warrant.