I do not know if I can match the eloquence of the previous speaker or bring Aristotle into play in support of the arguments I wish to make. The feature of the Bill I want to address in particular is that of casual vacancies and the principles by which such vacancies in the European Parliament are filled.
It seems that the original arrangements whereby members of the European Parliament could be substituted one for the other brought the European Parliamentary system into question — there was some degree of adverse public scrutiny because it was thought that these were sinecures. An attempt was made to remedy this situation by the introduction of a list of substitute candidates in the previous amending legislation. I concede that the idea behind this list was that people should not be brought from nowhere and suddenly put into the public eye as MEPs: it was thought it would take from the mandate of a member of the European Parliament to some extent if he or she had never been the subject of the slightest publicity or public acceptability.
The notion of a list of substitute candidates is somewhat defective in this regard. I do not know anybody in the Dublin region who ever looked at a list of substitute candidates before they decided to vote for a particular party. I do not believe any Member of this House could say, with their hand on their heart, that a member of the European Parliament was elected because of the quality of the published list of substitute candidates. Indeed, I would say that the great majority of the electorate are completely unaware of the identity of the substitute candidates and could not care less about the list. I do not think anyone ever decided to vote for, say, Deputy Proinsias De Rossa because Des Geraghty was second or third on the list. I believe people do not really care about this issue.
Subject to the basic proposition that the substitution of one candidate for another should not be open to abuse, there should be flexibility in terms of this list. Having regard to the fact that the European Parliament will remain in office for a fixed number of years, during which there may be events which make one substitute more or less desirable than another, the notion of preordaining the order in which people are to be selected as a substitute for an individual is inherently flawed. To take one example a person named as a substitute candidate might have become, say, nationally discredited in the intervening period and might for one reason or another have fallen in huge measure in public esteem. It might be that a person in those circumstances had become ill or had in the meantime changed his or her views so substantially as to make them controversial. This can happen in the context of a pre-ordained ranking of substitute candidates. Since people have little regard for the order in which names are laid out on the substitute lists, it is foolish then to say as a matter of law that that ranking is to have significance later. Instead of having a pecking order ordained in advance, parties should be permitted to put a number of possible candidates before the electorate as substitutes of equal ranking. It should be provided also that in the event of a casual vacancy arising, the parties themselves would select, in accordance with their own party rules, which of those persons was or was not the most suitable person to succeed to the seat vacated.
That would allow a reasonable amount of flexibility. The process whereby one becomes the third rather than the fifth candidate on a substitute list is so hidden from the public view that it cannot be a matter of great public interest as to whether the third or the fifth person is selected in any given circumstance. Ordinary rationality calls on us to query whether it is right to stick to the notion of serial candidates in a pre-ordained order.
A point that occurs to me that doubtless has not escaped the Minister's mind is that it would be open to any party under the present regime effectively to eliminate a candidate by denying that candidate membership if it anticipated one way or another that a casual vacancy was about to occur. If I was first in the list of substitutes and my party had decided that my views were no longer acceptable or that they wanted the number two man or woman to get the vacancy, it is open to that party simply to terminate my membership and according to the rubric laid down here, and under the existing law, I am thereby ineligible to become the substitute in the case of a casual vacancy. For instance, it would be open to a party, if it wanted to choose the fifth candidate and was unhappy with the other four, simply to terminate the membership of the first four candidates and thereby deprive them of eligibility under the proposal.
A political party is allowed, in principle, the right to deny the next person in the pecking order a seat by depriving them of membership of the party. If such a brutal method of achieving a result is allowed, one should be willing to permit a party to engage in a slightly more sensitive approach to the same issue, namely, to set out in its rules a means whereby a substitute candidate is selected. This could be by the parliamentary party, by a convention or by some kind of vote within the party membership since that is how the pecking order was established in the first place. I do not see what is right or necessary about a pre-ordained and inflexible system such as proposed compared with the flexible panel system which I am suggesting.
I would go even further by suggesting that even in relation to a panel, if a very good candidate emerges between one election and another, an eligible person who was not available to that party for one reason or another at the time of the first election, for instance, because he or she was a Member of this House and did not feel that they wanted to offer themselves as a substitute candidate but had lost their seat in the interval, a political party would not be doing an injustice to the electorate by selecting such a person to be a substitute candidate. Alternatively, if a person of undeniable talent became available to a political party, in circumstances that were not foreseeable at the time that the original selection convention took place and the original pecking order was established, should the party not be permitted in that context to decide on its own initiative to put that person into the panel and to have an election within the party to fill the casual vacancy?
I mention this because in elections past there has been a notion — and perhaps this is confined to my party, although I suspect it is fairly general — that the substitute panel of candidates is put in place so as to suggest an even spread across the constituency, thereby gathering local support and creating the impression of a general distribution of political appeal. That is precisely the wrong reason for deciding who will be a substitute. For example, if the Minister of State, Deputy Stagg, was a candidate there is no reason why there should not be three other equally suitable substitutes from Kildare. What is the point in saying that we must have somebody from Louth, Kildare, Wicklow and elsewhere in order to create an impression that party support is widespread or that the ticket is broadly distributed and representative of the entire constituency? It is not because only one person can have the seat and unless and until one's substitute status becomes of relevance, it is entirely a dead duck.
The idea of having a list of substitutes is rather inflexible. It should be possible for a political party, by a formal process of notification, to amend a list of substitute candidates. It may well be argued that there is no point in having a list but it might be argued also, for instance, that if an amendment was to be made at some time, say, six months before a casual vacancy arose to put somebody else in place as one of the eligible people on its panel, in those circumstances the public would have an opportunity to see what was planned and to express some view to which the political party in question would presumably be sensitive. Most political parties are not dominated by any one individual to such an extent that the ordinary membership of the party would be willing to surrender to its national executive or its leader an arbitrary personal choice in the matter. However, if a political party wants to do that and if the electorate know that that is the basis on which substitutes would be selected in the context of an election, people should accept that. For instance, if the Labour Party were to have a rule that Deputy Spring could select a substitute by virtue of the fact that he was Leader of the party, is it so terrible a notion that people voting for the Labour candidate would know that it was open under Labour Party rules, as distinct from, say, other parties' rules, for the Leader of the party to nominate the substitute rather than the general membership of the party in the constituency in question?
What is so terribly wrong about all of that? If some elementary precautions are put in place I suggest we could avoid any sense of abuse or devaluation in relation to the holding of European Parliamentary seats. I appreciate fully that it would be undesirable if people were allowed to parade a succession of nonentities into the European Parliament for the purpose of giving them jobs, stature or whatever. I appreciate that those are vices we should avoid. But I do not see it follows that at the beginning of a European election we should decide, in the case of any candidate representing a constituency as large as Leinster, that the order in which people are to substitute for him or her at any time during his or her tenure of a seat is to be determined in advance by a process which is wholly invisible, wholly opaque to the people and in circumstances in which the people do not know or care what order was actually established.
Could anybody put their hand on their heart and say that even 5 per cent of the electorate look at the substitute list and say: "Well, Michael McDowell is only a heartbeat away from succeeding to Pat Cox's seat and that influences my vote"? Could anyone put their hand on their heart and say that any significant proportion of the electorate would be the slightest bit influenced as to who was the second on a list? If so, I would say "Very well, then, let us examine this matter further". But since all of us in our hearts know that the electorate is completely uninterested in such a proposition, completely ignorant of it, do not care how the political parties decide the pecking order and, frankly, that even if they were made aware of it would not retain it in their minds for a second, if that is the factual position then why are we putting in place such a complex system as this, which I contend has buried within it a major flaw?
One thing that interested me, which was pointed out to me by the general secretary of my party, is that the procedure envisaged in the event of a casual vacancy arising is that the Clerk of the Dáil would write to the people named in the substitute list in the order in which they appear and ask them to fill out a statutory declaration saying that they were ready to act, that they were eligible and lastly, that they were still a member of the political party concerned.
It amuses me to imagine what would happen if, say, Deputy Sheila de Valera or Deputy Killeen, who have lost the whip of the Fianna Fáil Party or Deputy Desmond O'Malley, prior to his visit to Mount Street, or the Minister of State, Deputy Stagg, for that matter, were asked to put their hands on their hearts and make a statutory declaration as to whether they were or were not a member of a political party on a specific day. In that context it amuses me that no distinction is drawn between someone who has flown completely in the face of the party's organisation, ignored it and maybe embarrassed it and someone who has walked out of political life. It amuses me that in those circumstances a person can be imposed by the Clerk of the Dáil on the people because a list exists somewhere which 99.999 per cent of the people never heard of and none of them could care about.
I would ask the Minister to reconsider this procedure and consider whether it would not be desirable to put in place a more flexible system, one which would be less likely to give rise to controversy and in which a party could not simply circumvent by expelling a person. For instance, at present it would be possible for the Fianna Fáil Party, if Deputy Sheila de Valera's name appeared at the top of the list, to crown her achievement of departure from the party by expelling her from the party for conduct unbecoming, as has happened some Members of this House. In those circumstances that would be the end of it, she would no longer be eligible.
I suggest that this scheme is impractical, has not been well thought out and that there is a far better way of achieving the same result, one which would be more flexible, more likely to give rise to good candidates being made available rather than geographical spreads producing relative nonentities on the substitute list. We must remember that circumstances change in politics. To take an example, somebody could, as has Deputy Desmond O'Malley, step down from the leadership of a party and suddenly become available in circumstances which had not been anticipated. That type of flexibility would appear to me to be more desirable than an inflexible rule such as that proposed here.
I would genuinely ask the Minister to reconsider this matter, to reconsider the principles laid down in the new substitute section 15 of the Principal Act, proposed to be inserted by section 7 of this Bill, and consider whether he could not bring a good deal more openness, flexibility and accountability to politics than the provisions of this Bill, as at present drafted imply.
