So much has been said on this section already that I do not propose to make a long speech on it at this juncture. There have been several contributions from Senator Professor Quinlan, and he seems to resent the idea that we have not paid more attention to the advice that has been given to us by the six university professors who are members of this House. It is right and proper to attach due weight to the opinions expressed by these members because of their education and training, but at the same time other members of the House have as much experience, and probably more, of the working and the results of elections in this country over a number of years. We have had practical experience, indeed.
The Senator drew an analogy between the system of election that is in operation in the six north-eastern counties and what it is proposed to have here. Everybody knows, of course, that that is not a valid analogy. The system in the Six Counties is based on sectarian considerations which have no place in the life of this part of the country. We ought to be thankful for that, and I hope that it will always be so and that there will never be, as far as the political and public life of the country is concerned, any distinction between one religious section and another. We are all Irishmen and should all be proud to call ourselves Irishmen whatever denomination we belong to, and we should work for the country accordingly. Therefore, as I said, it is entirely wrong to refer in this way to the electoral system in operation in the Six Counties. First of all, we were told that we were adopting the British system. Now it appears that Senators have jumped from that to the Six Counties to try to make their case stronger, as they think; but throughout the debate we have heard very little about the system in operation in the United States of America and the system in operation in Canada, because it is the self-same system. It is the same electoral principle that they have in those countries and, under that system, the true principles of democracy have been upheld.
One would think from the way the members of the Opposition Parties in the Dáil and Seanad have been opposing this Bill that they have a vested interest in the P.R. system of election. One would imagine by the tenacity with which they have clung to the system that it had been kind to them over the years. It has been nothing of the kind. It has been very unkind to the Opposition Parties who are now trying to persuade the people that they should continue it, and the reason, I suggest, that the system has been unkind to these Opposition Parties is that these Parties have been unkind to themselves and to their followers. It is a well-known fact that when candidates are presented for election by certain Parties it is expected that, when they are elected, they will represent the views and ideas of the people who elected them, and retain their independence in their representation of their followers. That has not been the case on the part of some of these Opposition Parties, because it seems that in order to keep Fianna Fáil out of office they were prepared to throw away their independence.
Fine Gael did that, and they gained nothing by it. They threw away their independence to get the support of the smaller Parties in the Dáil to form a Government, and they firmly believed that their supporters in the country did not want them to do that, that they wanted them to stand on their own feet. As I have said, because they did not retain their independence as a political Party they did not gain anything by the change over. As for the other Parties, they have definitely suffered as a result of throwing away their independence as political parliamentary units.
As has been pointed out in this House already, since 1948 the Fine Gael Party have not improved their position, but the position of the Labour Party has disimproved considerably. In 1948 they had 19 Deputies in the Dáil and now they have only 11. Similarly, Clann na Talmhan had seven seats in Dáil Éireann, plus one Independent Farmer, and now they have three. Clann na Poblachta had ten in 1948 and now they have one. Let it be noted also that the Independents in the Dáil have gained seats; they had 11 in 1948 as against 16 now.
All that goes to show that it is better, in the long run, for political Parties to retain their independence as Parties, to work for the future, lay down a policy for themselves and stick to it. It is that more than anything else that has been responsible for the success of Fianna Fáil down through the years. The system of P.R., of which the Parties opposite are the great champions now, has not worked too well for them due to the fact that they gave the impression as time went on that they had no definite policy. That, in present day political life, will not be accepted by the people. The people require leadership. They require to be presented with a constructive policy, not a negative policy, by the Parties who go before them for election. The time is gone when the adoption of fancy names and political catch-cries would capture their imagination. Even the change of a name from Cumann na nGaedheal to Fine Gael would not do.
What is required from political Parties is a sound constructive policy based on the long-term welfare of the community, a policy that will have regard to the overall national interest and in which all sections of the people are likely to have confidence. If these conditions were not fulfilled it would not matter to the Parties concerned what electoral system would be in operation here, whether it would be one of the many kinds of P.R. or the single, non-transferable vote system. The reason why we are advising the people to change over from the P.R. system of election to that of the straight vote is that we believe that that is likely to give them more effective Government and pave the way towards a sound, constructive policy for the future.
Some of the Senators opposite, especially Senator Professor Quinlan, gave the impression that they attached very little importance to the examples we gave of how P.R. militated against the welfare of certain European countries. We have given those examples already and I do not wish to delay the House by repeating them. However, I want to emphasise that what has happened in the France, Germany and Italy has certainly a relationship to P.R. Were it not for the fact that they had P.R. in those countries the undesirable events that occurred would probably never have happened. P.R. paved the way towards the unsettled conditions that crept into those countries and for the confusions attendant on those unsettled conditions so that in the end the people did not know where they were as regards leadership. They had Governments composed of a multiplicity of Parties, and that played so much havoc with their political and economic life that the people were prepared to clutch at anything so as to have the situation clarified. It was because of that that dictatorships sprang up; otherwise those dictatorships would not have appeared at all on the political horizon.
These, of course, are larger countries than our own and it may be argued that the conditions in those countries would not be exactly parallel to those in Ireland. But, at the same time, it is true to say that human nature is much the same whether you are dealing with a large country or a small country.
If Senators want examples of small countries on the Continent of Europe that also have suffered as a result of P.R., they can be given. There are the examples of Finland and Iceland which had a system of P.R. and where, when the respective Governments were confronted with a crisis, they failed. That is inherent in the P.R. system of election. It gives rise to coalition Government or a multiplicity of Parties and there is an inherent weakness in that type of Government. When it is presented with a crisis, it fails. That is the very time that the Government should be able to stand, overcome the crisis and give the people the leadership to which they are entitled.
One thing certainly emerges from the debates in the Dáil and Seanad. It is that the political Parties opposed to Fianna Fáil at present, including Fine Gael, seem to have no confidence in their future. They have taken up a defeatist attitude on this measure. There is nothing as bad as that. I do not know why they have given way to such defeatism and pessimism. After all, if the Irish electorate change the system of voting, the new system—the majority system as it is called—will give these Parties the same opportunities as any other Party. They will have the same opportunity of achieving success because they will be operating under the same electoral conditions. It is like people who take part in a race. If the same conditions obtain for everybody, then everybody must be presumed to have the same chance of success. But it is the person who is trained, determined to win, and who has confidence in himself, who is likely to win. The same applies in the case of political Parties.
There are three requisites for the success of political Parties. First, they must have good leadership; secondly, they must have a good, sound, constructive policy; and, thirdly, they must believe in the effectiveness of that policy. If members of the Opposition Parties took these things to heart, if they adopted these principles, which are necessary for progress, they could have a future too under the system we are proposing to substitute for P.R. here.
The all-important question is: why are we advising the Irish people to do away with P.R.? I have already given many of the reasons. The all-important one is that under the straight vote you are likely at all times to have settled conditions in the country. I make use of the term "settled conditions" because when I mentioned another word before, some of the members opposite seemed to take a dislike to it. If you have not settled conditions in the country, there is no chance of making progress with the solution of the many problems that will confront the people from time to time.
I have given reasons before why I believe the single seat constituency is preferable to the three seat constituency, the five seat constituency or any other. One reason is that the T.D. who will be elected for that constituency will be able to concentrate his efforts more effectively in doing the things he will be expected to do for the people of the constituency. He will have less territory to cover and he will be better able to become an fait with the problems of his constituency. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that when a T.D. is elected, he realises that he is not a T.D. for his own Party alone but is a T.D. for all sections of the people of his constituency. When it is a case of one T.D. representing a constituency, he will have a stronger realisation of that. He will be the T.D. for all the Parties.
