I was referring last night to the two proposals which are before the House in these Bills and to the fact that it does not help discussion or understanding of the business before the House to suggest that their adoption would result in jack-boot dictatorship and further to suggest that those opposing them are solely interested in the defence of democracy in this country. I submit that it would be reasonable for the uncommitted voter who may be confused, and has reason to be confused, in that the Fine Gael Party which, in its own interest, should be supporting these Bills, is not doing so and that the Fianna Fáil Party which, in its own interest should be opposing them, is not doing so, to find out to whose advantage are these proposals and to find out the relation of everybody who supports them or who opposes them to his own advantage and to the national advantage. I further submit that such a non-committed voter would do well to weigh up the benefits to each Party in the light of these advantages as he sees them.
In regard to the proposal for a tolerance between different constituencies, I may say that what is proposed now to be put to the people is the system which we have operated in this country for 40 years. It is exactly the system agreed to unanimously by all the Parties in the Dáil and subsequently upset by a High Court decision. How has this system suddenly become a matter of grinding down minorities when it operated successfully all those years? Or was it all wrong then to agree to it? Or has it been wrong for 40 years? I would suggest that during that time we were operating a system which suited the requirements of this country. All of us know the great importance of county boundaries and we know that this system of dividing up constituencies was in accordance with our requirements.
That method had to be changed by a decision of the High Court, a decision based on the interpretation of one word in the Constitution. There have been suggestions that we in Fianna Fáil have been denigrating that decision or the judge who made it. There is no such intention as far as we are concerned. What we do say is that the system under which we operated was a system agreed to by all the Parties, the importance of which could only be understood by practising politicians. The eminent judge concerned acted within the strict limits of the law and arrived at a decision. I do not dispute that he was correct in law. The fact that he did so does not mean that the people should be deprived of something they understand, something they have watched in operation for 40 years. It does not help people to a fair and deliberate assessment of these proposals to suggest that this is a decision seeking to undermine democracy in this country when one remembers that the system now proposed is the system we used for so long and the system which was agreed to by all Parties.
The question of the difficulties which can arise in a constituency between members of the same Party is one to which the Taoiseach has referred. All of us in this House are aware of examples of this kind of thing and few of us can believe that it is to the benefit of the people or of democracy that this should be so. I know that the Labour Party have not got experience of this because they do not have more than one Deputy in any one constituency. They may have experience of it in the local bodies but the fact that the Labour Party have not got experience of this in the Dáil is no reason for stating that it does not exist and that it is wrong to try to do anything about it.
If the people could see an actual count going on under our system of proportional representation, and could see that it is not proportional, if they could see that in the case of the elimination of anybody upon the first count, the procedure by which the surplus is distributed is by taking the top bundle, they would understand that the system is not proportional at all. If they could look further, they would see how frequently there are cases of people who vote for a fairly popular candidate who fails to be elected and whose votes do not count at all, whereas there are other cases of people who vote for an unpopular candidate and can have up to their twelfth preferences counted. People who vote for a popular candidate may not have their first preferences counted.
