Guest post by Ken Carty (University of British Columbia) The pundits and editorial writers have worked themselves up over a bill to provide for abortions in the case of private members fetal abnormalities – a bill that may never pass out of the Oireachtas. The behavior of some ministers, we are told, ignores the constitution…
By Jane Suiter Political reform ran a poll here for a number of weeks, it has taken a little time to report the findings for which I apologise. We received some 485 responses to the poll with people from 16 to 65 responding from most counties across the country. These are of course not nationally…
Eoin O’Malley (5 March, 2011) Yesterday some of us wrote in the Irish Times about what might need to be done in the government’s first week to show it is serious about political reform. One of the suggestions was for using the Seanad route to appoint a minister with relevant experience to what will be…
The editors and contributors behind polticalreform.ie have teamed with a large volunteer team of project managers, web designers and others to produce ReformCard a measurement tool to rank each party based on the quality of their policies on political reform. We hope this will prove a critical instrument in informing the election 2011 debate. It…
This is a truncated version of the speech delivered by Dr Maurice Manning at the launch of The Houses of The Oireachtas on 25 November 2010 The Irish Parliament is one of the oldest continuously surviving parliaments in the world. Aside from its earliest years, its legitimacy has never been seriously questioned; it has provided…
Jennifer Kavanagh 1st December 2010 As it currently stands, if someone wants to see the current cabinet papers on the IMF bailout they must wait until 2040. It’s almost like the last line in the Oliver Stone film “JFK” where the father tells the son to wait for 30 years to see if he was…
In his weekly column in The Irish Times yesterday Stephen Collins argued cogently that radical political reform will be an urgent task of the new government Collins argues that it is now blindingly obvious that our multi-seat system of proportional representation played a big role in bringing us to where we are. “The system throws…
Eoin O’Malley 8 November 2010 Fine Gael’s new document on the reform of the public sector is released here. It’s a big document with a lot of stuff that seems more about actual policy that design of government. The main ideas is to make government smaller, and more responsive to the needs of citizens.
[Given to Political Reform in Ireland Conference, University College Cork, 26th March 2010] If the appetite for political reform emerged as a result of the economic crisis, then we should probably look at what caused the crisis. Power within the political system is centralised to government. It was government decisions that got us here, so…
Irish Politics Forum 