Fergus Finlay: We need better politics to thrive instead of adding on more TDs 

We need a citizens' assembly to debate this and propose constitutional change. Citizens' assemblies have proved their worth in Ireland again and again. It’s time to tackle the thorny question of how we exercise democratic choice.

I know the numbers are currently fixed by the Constitution, and we’ll need a referendum to change that. But the current rules are utterly absurd in a modern democracy with a rapidly growing population.

Only once have we ever been asked to consider the right balance of representation. That was more than 80 years ago when the Constitution was adopted. (I know we have been asked twice since to change the method of selecting TDs and decided against it.) When we were asked to adopt the current balance of TDs, our population was less than three million — 60% of what it is now.

The Constitution does place a lower limit on the number of TDs, for sure, but there is effectively no upper limit at all. Because of the growth in our population between 2011 and 2016, we needed five more TDs to meet the constitutional requirement. Between 2016 and now the population increase requires another 13 TDs. By the time of the next Census, we could be over 180 TDs.

And it’s going to get harder and harder to align constituencies to county boundaries. 

County boundaries matter in Ireland. They define our sense of tribe and neighbourhood, for good or ill. 

The introduction of a Wicklow Wexford constituency, which is going to have a decidedly odd feel to it, may look like a bit of an outlier today — I can’t ever see Wicklow Wexford sending a united team to Croke Park — but that sort of weird hybrid is going to be a feature of the future.

Please don't get me wrong. I believe in politics. The vast majority of politicians go into the business of politics to do good, to represent their constituencies meaningfully and to make a difference when they can on the national stage. Many are ambitious for higher office — and that’s a good and healthy thing.

And we can afford good representation. It’s fundamental to the quality of life that a country’s politics are healthy, vibrant and challenging. And decently professional too — the people we elect are chosen by us and deserve decent salaries. I’m up for all that and always have been. I never want to see them too comfortable, but that’s just cranky old me.

So when I argue that we have exceeded what ought to be the correct upper limit, I’m not just arguing against more politicians. I’m arguing for better and more balanced politics.

The first Dáil elected under the current constitutional rules was the 10th Dáil, elected in 1938. The new constitution said the total number couldn’t be less than one member for each 30,000 of the population, nor more than one member for each twenty thousand of the population. (Population, by the way, doesn’t mean citizens, or voters. You count every baby and every teenager when you’re deciding the population.) They may not have meant to count women, mind you. That 10th Dáil was elected on the highest number they were allowed — one for every 20,000 — and it produced 138 TDs. 135 of them were men — the vast majority comfortably into middle-age. There were three women, one named Mary and two named Bridget — and all three were widows of former TDs.

Personal experience

I started working in politics in the 24th Dáil. You’d think times would have moved on by then, wouldn’t you? But that Dáil was 28 TDs bigger than the 10th Dáil, because the population had grown by about half a million and they were still applying the highest number rule.

Of the 166 TDs in that Dáil, 12 or 13 were women, still less than 10%. You could see change coming in some ways, because many of them were remarkable women, elected in their own right, and many would leave a lasting legacy. 

My own Party, the Labour Party, had only one woman then — the extraordinary Eileen Desmond. We had sixteen TDs altogether (happy days!), and only one of them, Dick Spring, was in his early 30s. And he was routinely mocked in those days for being callow and inexperienced. (He would go on to prove the mockers wrong.) That Dáil (I think of it as my first Dáil even though I wasn’t a member, just a working stiff) was elected years after the swinging 60s, the upheaval of civil rights in America, the left-wing revolutions in France. But it was as if nothing had changed in Ireland since the 10th Dáil. Contraception and homosexuality were issues that dared not even speak their names.

The absence of women, and the reliance on a “tried and trusted” system of representation that heavily favoured middle-aged, middle-class men, was becoming more and more noticeable outside the House, if almost never on the floor of the House.

But the other thing that has changed — and it’s one of the reasons we don’t need as many TDs — is the professionalisation of politics. When I started, every TD had a secretary (Senators would share a secretary between three of them). They worked out of their Dáil offices or they met constituents in the front room of their homes.

Now they have teams of people and allowances for office facilities. They have constituency staff and parliamentary staff. The party system is heavily funded and resourced in a way it certainly wasn’t then. That’s a good and healthy thing because decent research and advice are essential to decent policy and decent political discourse.

But as it gets bigger, how are we to ensure that it becomes representative of a population that’s changing and becoming more diverse by the day? How do we get more women, more gay or non-binary people, more really young people into politics? How do we encourage and enable more people who haven’t had a paid-for education, more people who have experienced life on the margins — a period of homelessness, a struggle to pay rent?

I don’t know all the answers to those questions. I do know that simply increasing the number year after year is the most irrelevant answer possible. We need politics to thrive — look at other struggling democracies if you don’t believe me. That means asking hard questions. It means an honest discourse. I honestly believe that if we ignore the need for change, we’ll all come to regret it.