I shall begin by conceding immediately the truth of part of Deputy Molloy's closing words. This Bill, when enacted, will in no way guarantee the continuation in office of this Government. It cannot do so. I agree that a revulsion of feeling in an election which the Government had to face at a time of unpopularity would not only put it out but put it out decisively. I do not know whether the Opposition at that time would be the Fianna Fáil Party as it now is or some other kind of party or combination of parties, but I concede the possibility exists. If the Deputy said anything of importance with which we would not quarrel it is that this Bill will not, and cannot stitch the Coalition into power if the people do not want them.
I want to remind the House that this is the first time in the history of the State since the first Electoral Act of 1923 that the revision of constituency boundaries has been in any hands other than those of Fianna Fáil. There could be no question of gerrymandering in 1923: the party structural system had not emerged in quite the same shape. Certainly the civil war division was there, but the knowledge of local tendencies was by no means as sophisticated as it is now. There could be no sophisticated carve-up then. Every other constituency revision up to now was carried out by a Fianna Fáil Government. I think there was one in 1935, one immediately after the war, one which misfired in 1959 when the High Court declared it repugnant to the Constitution, a mending of hands in 1961 and Mr. Boland's last effort to cement his own party in power in 1969.
Deputy Molloy's heart is bleeding for the very minute differences—and they are minute because they are all well within any kind of tolerance— between the number of people behind each Deputy as between one part of the country and another. Apart from the fact that this revision is based, as it must constitutionally be based, on the 1971 census, Deputy Molloy knows perfectly well that there are some parts of the west of Ireland in which the decline in the population is continuous. So, in fact, if one were talking, not about the 1971 census, but about the situation today, one would find that the number of people actually standing behind Deputy Molloy himself once this Bill becomes law and if he is re-elected will be, in fact, smaller and substantially smaller than the number of people standing behind any Dublin Deputy. I realise that this is not strictly relevant because the law requires the Government to take heed, not of what is going to happen at the time of the election but of the population as it was at the last preceding census. Nonetheless, I think Deputy Molloy's tears will be the more easily dried if it can be pointed out to him and if it can be brought home to him that whatever may have happened in 1971 or whatever calculation was made based on those figures, by the time the next election comes around, even if that is tomorrow, he will find himself, if he is re-elected, representing far fewer people than the average represented by any Dublin Deputy.
Before I pass from the electoral history of the past, I want to add this: if the Fianna Fáil party in Opposition now find themselves for the first time since the Civil War facing a constituency revision being carried out by a Government other than themselves they have only themselves to thank. Deputy Molloy was good enough to give the House the actual date on which the census returns for 1971 were published. They were made public in July, 1972. From that moment on, in my contention—there is no question of contention about the first leg of this—the then Government could have and, in my contention, ought to have carried out a constituency revision.
There is no such thing as an open and shut case in law of any kind and I am not purporting to dogmatise to the House but my opinion, in which I am by no means alone, is that to hold a general election in disregard of the published results of the 1971 census was outside the terms of the Constitution. That is not to say that this House is now an illegel assembly because there is no cure for it. No court in the world would turn the whole of society on its head by declaring an assembly unlawful. Nevertheless I have to express the opinion, as I did then, that to hold a general election once the 1971 census results were out, showing as they did show a shift of population and growth of population at certain points, was not lawful having regard to the Constitution. So that Fianna Fáil have themselves to thank not only for their neglect but also for their defiance of the Constitution if they now find themselves being faced by a constituency revision carried out through a Government other than one composed of their own party.
A wide variety of options is open to any Minister for Local Government or any Government in regard to the number of constituencies or the number of seats in a constituency and Deputy Molloy knows that as well as everybody else in the House. He was speaking over the last couple of hours about various options which might have been open to the Minister, but which the Minister had chosen to neglect. One of these options was a large number of five-seat constituencies into which he thought Dublin might have been divided. We know that the greater the number of Deputies in a constituency the more proportionally representative the end picture will be. That is certain. There is no possibility of argument about it. But, it does not work out like that and has not worked out like that in the past that a five-seat constituency has always produced a neat division between the two or, at most, three parties. In saying this I am not purporting to speak personally for the Minister with whom I have never consulted on the principle behind his Bill. It has been the experience often enough that a five-seat constituency and, certainly, bigger ones than that, tended to bring in at the tail not necessarily a member of one of the large parties, but an independent. While independents have exactly the same rights as anybody else inside or outside the Dáil, once inside the Dáil, as anyone will admit, they tend to complicate calculations either from the point of view of the Government or from the point of view of the Opposition.
I admit, a complicated calculation is no reason for depressing the chances of an independent man to get elected but a system which, as it were, virtually invites the election of a large number of independents to a Dáil which is run both by law and by convenience on the supposition of party discipline on both sides is one which a Minister is justified in rejecting. I know there are large questions of political philosophy involved here and I realise that in saying that I am open to the charge of trying to sacrifice the pure democratic principle to convenience, but a balance has to be drawn somewhere and while I would not be necessarily opposed to a five-seat scheme I can see strong arguments against it and I believe that although we may not hear them from the other side of the House Deputies who are on the other side of the House will know what these arguments are and will share them. I will not mention the name of the Deputy, but I spoke last night to a Fianna Fáil Deputy who thoroughly agreed about this in regard to large constituencies, certainly in Dublin and perhaps anywhere in the country.
Deputy Molloy made some play of the contrast of convenience as between a country Deputy with a large area to service and a city Deputy who could process his constituency on foot or on a bicycle in a quarter of an hour. I do not want to dismiss that argument altogether. There is part of Donegal, which is a big county, with a heavily indented coastline and he regretted that the Minister proposed to make it a five-seat constituency spread over one million acres. It was a five-seat constituency at one stage and even a seven- or eight-seat constituency far back. I do not think it was divided into two—I speak subject to correction—until Mr. Boland divided it and before that the previous Fianna Fáil revisionists had been happy to leave it in that condition. I do not know why. Perhaps it suited them. Perhaps it merely seemed convenient to treat the county as a unit. That is the fact. If it is now being made a single constituency that is what it was in the past. It was only in the last session that it returned Deputies from two separate constituencies. I am open to correction on that. Perhaps it was so for two sessions but, certainly, Donegal for a long time was a single constituency.
Apart altogether from that, although I do not want to make little of Deputy Molloy's argument here, I can see, of course, that it is a nuisance in a sense to be looking for votes from people who live scattered over one million acres but the reality is, as Deputies who have been here much longer than I have know, that a Deputy in a large area tends to have what he thinks of as his own area and there are some constituencies in which Deputies of all parties would bite the hands of their colleagues if they were found trotting into their area to anything more than a dance. That does not entirely invalidate the force of what Deputy Molloy was saying but it seems to me to reduce it considerably. If there were 20-seat constituencies and if Deputy Molloy were returned as a member for one of them he would stick very largely to his own corner of it and he would be right to do so and would be doing what most Deputies effectively do. I am willing to be contradicted on this.
In a place like Carlow-Kilkenny you will find Carlow Deputies sticking to the Carlow end and the Kilkenny Deputies to the Kilkenny end. Even in the city the same is true. If there are two colleagues from the same party in a city constituency you will find—I have anyway noticed or believe I have noticed—a rough division of geographical responsibility between them. So that I do not attach too much importance to this argument which the Opposition spokesman on local government addressed to the House a while ago. When Mr. Boland revised the constituencies in 1969 he deprived the west of three seats. The present Minister proposes to deprive the west of two seats. The obligation on Mr. Boland was of exactly the same character as that on Deputy Tully, the Minister for Local Government. We are bleating about the loss of two seats in face of the necessity which the law imposes to have an even spread of representation. The Deputy's former colleague took three seats from the same area. This seems a feeble approach and one which will not make much impression even in the west.
I notice that the Members who make appeals about the west tend to wish the rest of us to believe that the people in the west are simple. They are not a bit simple. The average inhabitant of Galway, Mayo or Roscommon will see the sense of this. He will know that one border is enough. He would share with me the point of view that this distinction or boundary which appears to exist in the minds of politicians when they discuss the difference between Dublin and the rest of the country is not valid. If the people wish to come and live in Dublin, if when they arrive there they have children who grow up and get the vote, let them be represented there. About two-thirds of the existing population in Dublin are from parents who were not born in Dublin. To go back another generation, the proportion of the Dublin population which cannot show a Dublin pedigree is colossal. A very large number of people living here—and all one has to do is to be a Dublin Deputy going around during election time and knocking on doors to know—are not Dublin people. You meet people from all parts of the country. You can talk to them about mutual friends from north, south, east and west. They still retain a loyalty to their own counties although Dublin has full associations for them. It serves to break down this idiotic, imaginary barrier between Dublin and the rest of the country. I repudiate this.
It is idiotic for a spokesman like Deputy Molloy to be whinging about Dublin getting seats and the west not. This is a small country with a small population. I freely admit that the bigger a city the more services it attracts and a scattered population may be neglected and will not have the same concentration of services. That is the same everywhere in the world. If the population of the west has been declining since the Famine it is part of a process which I will not be so vulgar as to lay at the door of Fianna Fáil. It may be largely their fault that this has happened but I do not subscribe to that view. It will not be stopped by putting extra Deputies into the west. I hope it will stop and that this Government or a future Government will effectively stop the population decline in the west. It will not be done by putting a "complaints" man with the title of TD into Ballisodare or Tulsk. The fact is that if you were to say to a man forced to leave the west because of economic circumstances that the Government were trying to save him by giving him an extra Deputy he would laugh at you and rightly so. He would say: "What good is that to me?"
I do not go along with the talk about the west of Ireland. The Minister is now doing a less severe job than Mr. Boland did when he deprived the west of seats but he has to do it. So far as the complaints about Dublin are concerned if the people choose to live here in great numbers, that is where they must be represented.
Dublin is too big. It is over-blown. We do not want a capital city of this size. There is no need for it. We can see from the traffic snarls, the grandiose plans for flyovers and underground railways which are the latest thing, that it is too ludicrous a size for a Republic with a population of only three million. That is the end result of a long trend for which I would not necessarily assign the blame to the Opposition. If Governments have any function in planning or control over large-scale developments in the area under their charge, surely the discouragement of urban growth, the encouragement of decentralisation would be one of these things. If Dublin is a gigantic anonymous ball, and if the people flocking here are housed in what can only be termed concrete jungles they must be represented here. We must look around to see where the fault lies for this overgrowth—and I freely admit it is an overgrowth. I do not think this Government will carry much blame for that, if the blame is ever assigned. A man living in a concrete jungle has a much less agreeable life than the man living along the coastline. He has problems to contend with which the man in the country has not. I cannot see why the man in the country should be less productive of problems than the man in the city.
The Roscommon Herald on 9th November produced an editorial article called “Bully for Tully.” It was a very severe piece of journalism in which the editor says that just as he was harsh on Mr. Boland in 1969 for taking seats from the west, he will be harsh on Mr. Tully for doing the same thing. He also said that the Connacht counties had fared badly in the carve-up. I can understand the exasperation of a western journalist if he feels that a trick is being played on him or that he is being in some way robbed. He is not being robbed. The only possible way that the editor of the Roscommon Herald could have been made happy would have been if the people in '68 had passed the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution Bill. If the people had passed Mr. Boland's amendment whereby a tolerance of a fairly large scale would have been permissible the Roscommon Herald would have had nothing to complain about because it would have been open to the Minister, had he wished it, to leave in the west and areas of declining population more Deputies than he has. The people voted it down and the people of Roscommon were one of the constituencies which voted it down most firmly.
Only four constituencies in the country said "yes" to Mr. Boland's proposal which was backed by the Fianna Fáil party and their powerful propaganda machine. The constituencies were West Galway, the two Donegal constituencies and Clare. This county from which this editorial comes thundering up to Mr. Tully's table voted down the only possible way in which a favour could have been given to the people in the west of Ireland at the expense of those in Dublin. That is one of the reasons why I say that they are made out by their political and journalistic representatives as being more stupid than they are. The average inhabitant of Roscommon or any other western county knows perfectly well that he is not entitled to political advantage at the expense of the man living in Tallaght or Ballymun. I can only imagine the contempt with which he must receive the complaints like those we have heard from Deputy Molloy about how he was "done in the eye". Another couple of Deputies would not make much difference to his situation.
Deputy Molloy spoke of gerrymandering as though no distribution of constituencies to suit the then Government had been carried out on the last occasion. I have no wish to become involved in a sparring match at this stage, but I expect we will have plenty of time for that later in the long debate that the Deputy has promised us. There is no point in indulging in a foolish exchange of abuse as to what Mr. Boland did or did not do, but I will give the House some figures to illustrate what was the net result of his activities in respect of the Dublin four-seat constituencies that he planted in 1969.
In 1973, this was the situation in the constituencies of Dublin Central, Dublin North Central, Dublin North East, Dublin North West, Dublin South Central and Dublin South West —I have omitted Dublin South East because it was a three-seater: Fianna Fáil won 85,534 first preference votes, while the figure for Fine Gael was 56,986 and Labour got 51,317 votes. With their vote, Fianna Fáil returned 12 Deputies, Fine Gael returned seven and the Labour Party returned five. If one were to break down these figures into terms of cost per seat, as any schoolboy might be asked to do, it would be seen that the cost per seat to Fianna Fáil was 7,128 votes, the cost to Fine Gael was 8,141 votes per seat and the Labour Party got their seats at a cost of 10,261 votes each.
If one averages the Fine Gael and Labour vote, as we are entitled to do in 1973 because the parties were recommending transfers to each other, it would be found that the Coalition's 12 seats were bought at a cost of 9,025 votes each as against 7,028 votes each for Fianna Fáil. In other words, the result of Mr. Boland's activity was to give cheap seats to Fianna Fáil. That is how it was intended to be and I say that without rancour. Deputy Molloy said that there were various ways in which the Minister might have held on to the existing plan. Would the Minister not need to have a hole in his head to hold on to that plan? Would a baby be prepared to do so? Leaving aside the question of trying to get advantage for oneself, would not any Minister for Local Government charged with a revision such as this, at least try to undo the damage that was done by the 1969 revision.
