Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I am very glad that the Ministers and Ministers of State (Successors) Bill has reached Second Stage. A lot has happened since I first put the Bill forward. It seems like an age has passed in the history of the country since the Bill was tabled way back in the middle of the lockdown.

We had a very strange situation following the general election. We had a period of 140 to 150 days when the political establishment got involved in a slow set, a merry dance, a very slow political process of trying to form a government. During that time, we had a Taoiseach who lost a general election. We had Ministers who had lost their seats and had no mandate themselves. We had a Dáil that was unable to legislate. We were in the middle of one of the most severe health crises in the history of the State. A pandemic was rolling across the world in our direction and we had a political system that was in effect completely broken.

We were not able to make life-or-death decisions in Leinster House. Eleven Senators could not be selected because the Taoiseach had to be the Taoiseach elected by the new Dáil before the Senators to be nominated by him could be selected. As a result, the Seanad was in abeyance. As we know, the Oireachtas needs the two Houses to function properly and deliver legislation. On plenty of occasions emergency legislation was necessary and we had a political system that was flailing about, trying to get its act together and get things done when it needed to most.

One of the most striking images was that of the then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, who was in Government Buildings designing and developing one of the most rigid and restrictive plans that any Government in the history of the State had ever developed. That was done in Government Buildings. He got into his ministerial car and drove to RTÉ to deliver the contents of that plan. Here we were, the elected Deputies who had a refreshed mandate - some of them had a new mandate - at Leinster House at their desks twiddling their thumbs not really sure what the content of that plan was and with no opportunity to feed into that plan, no opportunity to block, stop or amend any elements of it whatsoever. All they could do was pick up their remote control and listen to the speech the Taoiseach was going to deliver in RTÉ. They were, like the rest of the citizens, helpless.

If that type of political dysfunction had lasted so long anywhere else in the world, there would have been uproar. If President Trump were completely to ignore the Houses of Congress and take all the power within that democracy into the hands of just a small executive, ignoring the freshly elected representatives, it would be all over the news. People would be shouting from the rafters and hammering the action if that was the case. However, that was what was happening in Ireland. There was a breathtaking subversion of democracy in that period. We are a republic and the most important element of how this republic functions is the democratic system. The idea that citizens are sovereign and are in control, and that we legislate on their behalf at their will, is a key element of what a democracy is and yet that issue was subverted for a long period of time.

The Government parties seemed to make this issue personal at the time. When I raised this there were three Ministers who had lost their seats in Cabinet at the time. There is nothing personal about the Bill and nothing personal about the desire to see the actions of the people implemented as soon as possible in any new Dáil in future. I imagine some of those Ministers found it very difficult to have lost their seats. It is a very difficult personal experience and they had to remain in that role at a very difficult time. There is nothing personal in this; it was not an insult.

However, many people at home were asking how such a person was still a Minister. Did that person not lose their seat? In fact, many of the citizens of this country saw it as an insult to them that these Ministers were staying on. Many people on the street felt that here were Ministers who having had a certain number of years in office had achieved pensions for their particular roles and if they made it to June, those pensions were going to increase. Obviously with the process of Government formation taking so long, many of those saw their ministerial pensions increase.

A couple of things were at the heart of this crisis. Society had a sense of urgency.

The body politic was in a bubble and was detached from that sense of urgency. I believe it was full of its own self-importance with regard to how to proceed. Any political establishment that takes nearly 150 days to get together to negotiate is radically detached from the reality of people's lives. That detachment underlined the subversion of democracy and the idea that a person serves only by the will of the people.

Obviously we have a Constitution, which is the basic law of the State. That Constitution makes provision for a caretaker government after an inconclusive election for the period in which political parties are negotiating with each other but I am not sure that anybody here can say that the writers of the Constitution honestly felt that a government formation process would take 150 days. I am not sure that anybody would have thought that a ministerial office would be a blank cheque that could last for such a length of time. There is no doubt in my mind that 150 days is not the longest period of government formation we may witness in our lifetimes. We are living a far more fractured political environment than we have ever seen before. With the way things are going, it is likely that we could see 200 or 250 days of negotiations on government formation in the future.

The key question is whether a Minister who does not have any democratic mandate should be able to spend billions of euros of people's money. Should a Minister with no more of a mandate than my four year old son be able to make key decisions relating to people's lives, rights and entitlements? My instinct is that he or she should not. There has to be a logical deadline by which we replace those Ministers.

The Constitution says that Ministers stay in place until the Dáil chooses successors to replace them. My Bill creates a deadline of six weeks. The existing Minister has an opportunity to function, to tidy up his or her office and to make sure that issues which have to be dealt with quickly are dealt with but, after those six weeks, a decision would be made to select a new Minister. The names of the Ministers would be put before the Dáil to be voted on. The new Minister, who would have won an election and would have a democratic mandate, would then function within the Chamber. It is a very simple process and I believe the six-week element of this Bill will be radically helpful in the future. It will create a deadline for government formation because parties in a caretaker government that are part of negotiations will not want to go before the Dáil to seek a replacement Minister because they will know that there will be political challenges in doing so. Minds will be focused on trying to form a government within that six-week period. That is simply what this Bill does.

This proposal means that if one wants to be a Minister in this country and if one is going to act and exercise the authority democracy gives a Minister, one must first and foremost have been democratically elected. Democracy is not just for Christmas or for the good times. It is not just some kind of appendage or add-on which we do our best to get around to at some stage. Democracy is sacrosanct. Nothing built in this Oireachtas should be built on anything but a democratic foundation. Any effort to do otherwise means ignoring the people and shows how separate the elected representatives in this Chamber have become.

There is also a practical element to this Bill which relates to the junior Ministers. A vote of the Dáil is not necessary to replace a junior Minister. They can be replaced on the will of the Taoiseach so there is no real difficulty in replacing them after six weeks. In that situation, junior Ministers would be able to attend the Dáil to answer questions. A situation arose here where newly elected and newly minted Deputies wanted to ask the then Minister of State, Senator Kyne, questions at the start of this Dáil term. In fairness, he wanted to answer those questions in the Dáil but he could not.

A Minister without a mandate was making decisions while completely unaccountable to the Dáil. At the very early stages of the confused situation we were in, the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, was coming to the Chamber to answer questions for Senator Doherty. One of the problems I have with Irish politics is that it was an accountability-free zone for many years. One of the only tools we have to hold people accountable is democracy. Everybody here knows that if we do the wrong thing, there is a good chance we will not be elected at the next election and will not be able to continue our work. We all have clinics to go to every week where we listen to the people and make sure we understand what is happening at a grassroots level and in real people's lives. If one is a Minister who has already lost one's seat, however, one is not threatened by the possibility of losing that seat. That key element of accountability is lost in that situation.

It is also incredible that, at the start of this particular Dáil, there was a Minister who basically said that she did not want to answer certain questions as they were questions for the next Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. There was an attitude among Ministers who were being fully paid and whose pension entitlements were increasing that they did not have a responsibility to answer Deputies' questions.

There is also an economic cost to the current situation. At present, 160 Deputies must be elected but Ministers without mandates must also be paid a certain amount. The current process therefore costs the State approximately €40,000 a week.

The key issue, however, is one on which we must really focus and which must be at the heart of all we do here. We need to find a mechanism to make sure the democratic deficit that existed and the crash in democracy that occurred at the start of this Dáil does not happen again. The best way to do this is to introduce a deadline and to use the skills and energy within the Dáil to fill those ministerial seats. Some people will say that certain Ministers are fantastic even though they lost their seats, that they have great experience and that people would have to read themselves into their ministerial briefs to be able to deal with them. There is a serious problem if we are saying that we do not have the political and technical skills necessary to do these jobs within Leinster House and that we have to rely on people who are not elected representatives to do them. We need to make sure we do not divorce the actions of this Dáil from the accountability and oversight inherent in the democratic institutions.

Some people may disagree with the six-week time limit and perhaps with the selection of Ministers. They may feel the responsibility should be passed to an existing Minister, as has happened under previous Governments. That is fine but this Bill should be allowed to grow on Committee Stage. People should be allowed to table amendments to improve it, if necessary. We should not, however, lose this opportunity only to find ourselves in another crisis in three or four years' time seeing 200 years of the will of the people ignored.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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We believe there is no constitutional problem with the Bill. We have sought legal advice from constitutional lawyers on it and we use language in the Bill that is fully sympathetic to the language of the Constitution. The words were chosen to meet the needs of the Constitution. The Bill seeks that a new Dáil select and appoint Ministers. This is a key point. The Constitution demands what is necessary. It states a successor needs to be selected from the new Dáil and appointed to the position of Minister. That is exactly what the Bill also states.

It is notable that in the ten years I have spent in the Dáil, on most occasions that Governments opposed certain Bills they did so under the banner of the Constitution. When there is something good in a Bill that is hard to argue against, such as the democratic premise and the necessity for democracy in this Bill, very seldom do we see Government parties rush headlong into that particular objective because it does not look good for members of the Green Party, Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael to say they oppose the premise that Ministers should be fully elected.

7 o’clock

That is a hard thing to argue on the streets of one's home town, on one's local radio station or even on the national airwaves. Therefore, when a Government is faced with the choice as to whether to go headlong into what is actually a positive or healthy thing in a Bill, it often lifts the banner of the Constitution. It is just funny on this occasion because on most occasions, the Government will say it has received advice from the Attorney General that the Bill is not constitutional. Then there is a back-and-forth in the Chamber, with the Opposition asking to see the advice and Government saying it never shows the advice. On this occasion, however, the Government has not even gone as far as to say the Bill is unconstitutional or to say the advice of the Attorney General is that it is unconstitutional. All the Government is saying is that it is a little iffy, that it may or may not be constitutional. That is not a good enough response to set back a Bill from being discussed on the next Stage. I will read out the words of the Bill itself:

On or before the specified date, the Taoiseach shall, with the previous approval of Dáil Éireann, nominate for appointment by the President the successors in office of those Ministers who have ceased to be members of a House of the Oireachtas.

The Bill is designed in sympathy with the needs of the Constitution.

I am surprised by the words of Deputy Nash on this. He stated in his contribution - I am paraphrasing but I think I am doing justice to what he said - that he does not see that a Minister who has been democratically elected is preferable. That is a shocking statement. A democratic mandate is not just preferable but sacrosanct. It is without question necessary. Going back to Lincoln - "government of the people, by the people, for the people" - or any of the great democrats who have gone before us, they have built the idea of mandate at the centre of executive government. Deputy Nash also stated that the Taoiseach could come into difficulty in a future Dáil if the Dáil were not to play ball with the Taoiseach and not ratify his or her preferred ministerial appointees. That is like saying a future Dáil is likely to believe that a Minister without a democratic mandate is preferable to a Minister with a democratic mandate, which, again, is very hard to see because any Opposition party preventing the swapping out of a Minister with no mandate would find that a very difficult sell anywhere in the country. It would definitely be a challenge to a Taoiseach in the future to face such a situation. It would be a headache. However, perhaps that headache would be enough to give that Taoiseach a kick in the backside to get Government formation done in a timely fashion. Perhaps we would not see 150 days slide by.

There was a process on the most recent occasion of Government formation whereby what are now the Government parties were meeting each other once a week. We in Aontú were involved in that Government formation. We contacted Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. It was five or six weeks before they responded. It should be remembered that we have a pandemic washing across the world. We had a Government without a mandate, a Dáil unable to legislate, freshly minted Deputies unable to ask questions of Ministers of State and Ministers of State not able to come in to answer questions. We had Ministers simply saying it was none of his or her business and to wait until the next Minister came along. It is an unsatisfactory situation when the Legislature cannot legislate. I refer to the idea that we would see that democratic deficit, that crisis that existed just a few months ago, as something we just move on from and do not seek to tackle. Moreover, when an Opposition political party puts up a reasonable response and is open to future developments in respect of a Bill to improve it and make it suitable to the other political parties, that opportunity is not grasped.

The Minister mentioned the Seanad and said two Seanadóirí can become Ministers. In fairness, though, do we not agree that the Seanad needs reform? I, for one, believe the Seanad is undemocratic and needs to have a stronger democratic mandate in the future. There is probably a room full of reports on Seanad reform somewhere in the Houses of the Oireachtas. Nothing is happening about that, unfortunately. Just because the Seanad is undemocratic and there is a process that allows for an appointee of a Taoiseach to become a Minister does not necessarily mean we should start from that position legislatively to try to fix this situation.

As Deputy Gannon rightly said, there was a radical urgency and a hunger among the people during the most recent general election campaign. It is interesting that when I first floated this Bill, it got support from right across the political spectrum. People who would not necessarily share my politics at all came out strongly in support of the idea that democracy is sacrosanct and that Ministers should be democratically elected. There is an urgency, and there was an urgency in the process of Government formation that did not happen. Democracy delayed is democracy denied. How long does it take for the will of the people to be stopped before it is undemocratic? It seems to me that the process we have now gives no end date to that difficulty. There is a real and practical necessity for this place to be able to legislate in future. If we close our eyes to this now, I guarantee that within the next 20 years, there will be a moment in time when the hands of the Dáil will be tied, unable to legislate. There has to be accountability. Of course, there are Ministers who retire and, as such, do not go through the test of the election, but in the main the test of the election is a serious one. How many Deputies sit here without the idea of the test of the election constantly in the back of their head? Everybody has it in the back of their head when they work here.

By voting against this Bill, parties are voting against the implementation in a timely fashion of the will of the people. By voting against the Bill, they are voting against the premise that Ministers should have a democratic mandate. By voting against the Bill, they are highlighting the separation of this bubble from the urgency of the real world. I ask the Minister of State to reconsider and have a discussion among Cabinet. I am not saying by any means that the Bill is perfect. We are the smallest political party in the Chamber. We do not have the resources of other political parties. We certainly do not have the resources of the Government drafters. I ask the Government to work with us on this, let the Bill proceed to Committee Stage, bring forward the Government's amendments and let us make sure we do not have such a democratic crisis again.