The Government’s planned reforms of the Dáil announced last week, while welcome, are underwhelming. There are some good proposals such as the routine use of pre-legislative scrutiny. But much of the reform just tinkers with the details of when and where TDs will work. Working extra days or longer hours won’t achieve anything if the…
Dr Seán Patrick Donlan, School of Law, University of Limerick Predictably if depressingly, the debates around the Government referendum on the abolition of the Seanad have proven to be as ideological as intellectual, often more sophomoric than substantive. The vote honours a political promise initially made by parties and personalities now on both sides of the…
Below I’ve pasted the announcement by the government for Dáil reform. One thing to note I suppose is that it is the government that does this and not the Dáil itself making its own rules. On the reforms themselves, the phrase ‘a day late and a dollar short’ comes to mind. ——————— Dáil Reform Note…
Post by Iain McMenamin (Dublin City University) The hydraulic theory of political finance holds that money, like water, will always find its way through cracks in the regulatory system. Humans have become very good at waterproofing buildings. It should also be possible to moneyproof politics, to ensure that political finance only flows through the approved…
Posted by Theresa Reidy (UCC) Fine Gael launched its campaign to abolish the Seanad last week and this week, we finally got the date for the referendum. Political reform is back in the headlines and set to take up a reasonable chunk of the airtime during silly season. Seanad abolition is one of the central…
Post by Mary C. Murphy, University College Cork The 2011 Irish general election produced an exceptionally high level of turnover of TDs. 76 or 45% of the current 166 Dáil members were never TDs before. This represents the first time since 1923 that a majority of those elected did not belong to the previous Dáil.
The current calls for some form of inquiry into the economic collapse and the government’s response to it are understandable in the light of the Anglo tapes. While they probably didn’t reveal much that we hadn’t already suspected, their tone was abhorrent to most. What is not reasonable is that we concentrate our blame on…
StatPlanet is an application that allows you to access, visualise and analyse all the 5000+ indicators available from the World Bank database through interactive maps and graphs.
By Iain McMenamin The study of corruption and political finance in Ireland has tended to be qualitative. This has made it difficult to determine whether problems related to a relatively small number of individuals of the system as a whole. My article, “Business Financing of Politics in Ireland: Theory, Evidence and Reform” in the current…
The Quality of Government Institute in Sweden has released a new cross-national and time-series dataset on. Details below
Irish Politics Forum 