One hears these stories, and this is not against the tenor of my speech. The tenor of this part of my speech is that the changes which will take place will be, as far as possible, to the advantage of the Government Party, and that is why we are dealing with this proposed amendment.
The changes will not be due merely to population, although that will be the fundamental reason for the changes, but inside the framework of that the lines of the constituencies will be drawn in ways that will be to the advantage of the Fianna Fáil Party. That is why it is being done.
The various universities here, TCD and, I think, National, have carried out surveys which show that the Fianna Fáil Party at the last election, with 47.7 per cent of the votes, secured 50 per cent of the seats. In fact, and I daresay this has been pointed out by the other speakers, since the 1920s the Fianna Fáil Party have secured, with a minority of votes, a larger proportion of the seats than those votes warranted. However, not content with this consistent bonus they now want to obtain a share of the seats up to three-fifths greater than their share of the votes, that is, 60 per cent as against 40 per cent. I personally am not afraid of the future from a Party point of view but I am afraid of the future from a longterm point of view.
When I was speaking before Questions, I pointed out that our people had used this very civilised method of voting with great skill, and it is obvious that they understand it perfectly well; it is not just a case of luck. First of all, the percentage of spoiled votes is minimal. Taken over the whole country, it is not even one per cent. I would say this from my own personal experience of watching the counts and going through the spoiled votes, that the great majority of the spoiled vote papers, small as they are in number, that have to be dealt with are spoiled because the presiding officer did not stamp the paper correctly. That is one of the commonest causes. Maybe the stamp which was used had become worn and did not make its mark on the paper and perhaps some of the papers got into the box before the presiding officer realised that the stamp was not making a proper mark. There will be reasons like that, and a large proportion of spoiled votes are not necessarily spoiled by the action of the voter at all. I would say that they are no higher than the spoiled votes under the straight vote system. Our people understand thoroughly the system they are working, and it is not a valid argument to say that this is too complicated a system for either rural or urban populations. That is just not a fact.
One of the great advantages of this system is that it enables the voters to express shades of opinion. It also enables Parliament to be a microcosm, a small copy, of the country in general reflecting in some smaller way the various shades of opinion in the country, with even perhaps a place for some crackpot person. People have been elected to Parliament on what could be called crank views, but they seldom lasted very long. There is no harm in an odd one slipping through. They are no more likely to slip through under PR than they are under any other system. Certainly, with a system of PR, one gets a Parliament which expresses the various shades of opinion. It is not just a case of one side winning overwhelmingly and the other side being overwhelmingly defeated. The legislative assembly resulting from it, like this horseshoe we have in the Chamber, represents gradations of change and not just a harsh line of one side always speaking for a motion and the other always against it.
It is truly remarkable how we in Ireland over the past few years have overcome the difficulties and—I will use the terms—the dislikes and the hatreds resulting from a civil war. That has gone out of Irish public life like snow off a ditch and it has long disappeared out of this Chamber. I believe we owe a great deal of that softening, a great deal of that reasoning, to the fact that we have operated this system of proportional representation, which has room for shades of opinion inside a Party as well as outside it. I firmly believe it has helped to bring about this happy position in Ireland today where that unhappy period is now forgotten from a political point of view and is rapidly passing into the realm of history as far as the participants are concerned— and there are plenty of people left who took part in that struggle. Our system has helped us to close that chapter.
Another advantage of proportional representation, which only comes out in the working of it, is that a voter may have a choice inside the Party of his choice. If under the single member constituency system, Mr. X represents Fianna Fáil, take the case of a voter who for some reason or other does not like Mr. X. If he does not vote for Mr. X, he is put on the horns of a dilemma. He would like to see that Party successful—we will imagine he was so misguided—but he would have to balance up whether he liked his Party better or disliked Mr. X the more. There have been many examples of that in England recently. I can think of the case—I will not mention any names—of one very prominent man who occupied a very high position in his Party, was a member of the Cabinet, I think, and lost his seat. There was an awful commotion about it. One read that a number of his supporters had come to dislike him so much that they changed against their Party and either abstained from voting or voted for the member of another Party. A voter is not faced with that harsh choice under proportional representation. He can vote for another member of the Party of his choice. Therefore, again you can get gradations, such as I have referred to. That is one of the reasons why these grades come in the Parties.
Each of the three big Parties in this House has what you could call a right, a centre and a left. That has come about through this choice—this deliberate choice, make no mistake—of the voter. Therefore, you get a very subtle type of voting going on. At the end of it, you have a Parliament as near as you can get to one which represents, faithfully and minutely, the people who sent the Deputies there. That is one of the reasons why the proportional representation machine is a great steadier in a country.
The Minister for External Affairs talked about the weakness of France before 1939. In my opinion, the weakness of France did not come from her electoral system. The Minister said that France did not arm herself—of course, she did not arm herself properly—and he said that was due to proportional representation. That is nonsense. It was due to the fall of successive French Governments. It is now a matter of history and has nothing to do with the France of today. It was due to the parliamentary system by which the fall of a ministry was not followed by a general election, and so a number of people in that Parliament had a great deal of power without the responsibility of facing the electorate every time they had a reshuffle and formed a new Government.
It is easy and simple to stand up and say that France's weakness was caused by PR but, in fact, there is no word of truth in it. England was just as weak— weaker in fact. She was less well prepared than France and, being an island she could afford that luxury. It had nothing to do with her electoral system. There was a most powerful government, an overwhelming Government, in power in Britain during the 1930s. The Party which would have been the traditional party of rearmament even with a huge majority in the House of Commons were not strong enough in their minds to carry it out. They had a very small Opposition against them.
This brings me to another point in this argument for the type of electoral system we have giving us the Government we get at the end of it. Very often good government is, in fact, vigilant Opposition—not always, but very often. Certainly if a country gets an overwhelmingly powerful Party, that Party will sow the seeds of its own decay within itself unless it is watched by a very vigilant Opposition. I should like people who read the Dáil Reports, and so on, to realise that if you have an Opposition too small in numbers, they will not be able to fulfil the duties of an Opposition. They will simply be swamped with work, especially if you have three Parties as we have in this country, and I think it is a good thing.
If you have too many people on the Government side and not enough over here, whether the Opposition be Labour or Fine Gael or farmers, or anything you like, you will not have sufficient people to man your Opposition front benches, or they will be so overworked that they will not be able to do it, and they will not be able to maintain the background organisation which an Opposition find it necessary to have, so that people who are speaking on various subjects are well supplied with data concerning their speeches. Very few people can or will stand up to speak on a subject without having some information, and without having certain people to dig out certain facts for them.
All those things come into the picture of strong government. Strong government is all right. It may be good and it may equally be bad. Strong government in itself does not mean a thing. It may mean strong Opposition. Certainly strong government is dangerous. It is dangerous because there is always the fear that a Party strong in numbers will often be highly sensitive to any form of opposition, just as an elephant which is a very strong animal can be driven mad with fear by a mouse. Strong governments have been known to attack ideas and people as fiercely as an elephant would attack a mouse if it got into the house with it.
So the arguments that we must have strong government are not at all as valid as they appear to be. They may do all right for crossroads speeches, but they should not be exhibited here as if the be-all and the end-all of parliamentary life were strong government. In fact, the strength of a Government is their sensitivity to public opinion, and their selectiveness of such opinion, rumours and so on. That is where a Government really show their skill. Obviously a Government must not yield to every form of agitation. They must be strong enough to stand up to that. A Government must also be pliant enough to take up ideas themselves and make beneficial legislation out of them. A Government cannot always be at the beck and call of the public, nor can they be too adamant against the voice of the people. There must be a balance between the just claims and the unjust ones which are made on every Government.
That brings me back again to the shades of opinion which are possible under PR, and which are not possible under the so-called straight vote system, which, in fact, is not a straight vote at all. Government really means doing what is necessary and what ought to be done for the people. There are other things, too, but that is a great deal of the duty of a Government, and when the Government are composed of people who form themselves under one of the big Parties, then you can get that, but you do not get it so much where you have one man in a seat. He is there in the seat and he is the sole interpreter to his own Party of his constituency. No one else can say: "Oh, but Deputy So-and-so, you know, is talking nonsense about the south city." No one else would know unless he was a Member, so you get this sensitivity and a great deal of subtlety in this method of PR. We can be very proud of the Irish people who have handled this system, which its enemies say is so complicated, as skilfully as a horse-trainer handles a young horse he is breaking in. That is to our good. For a people like us who can feel very passionately, and rightly so, on many subjects, it is very good to have a leavener under PR to ensure that no overnight change can be brought about. So much for the need for a strong Government.
I want to say something about the Governments we have had in the past. We began in 1923 with the Cumann na nGaedheal Government who had only 39 per cent of the total votes cast in the 1923 election. There were two elections in 1927 and in the June general election, they got 27 per cent. In 1932, Fianna Fáil came in with 44 per cent. In 1933, they had 49.9 per cent; in 1937, they had 45 per cent; in 1938, they had a slight majority with 52 per cent; in 1943, Fianna Fáil had 41.9 per cent; in 1944, 48.9 per cent; in 1948, 41.9 per cent; in 1951, 46.3; in 1954, 43.4; in 1957, 48.3; in 1961, 43.8 and in the last general election, 47.7 per cent. You see that only once, in 1938, did Fianna Fáil have 52 per cent of the total votes cast. Neither they nor any other Party ever got that percentage of votes before or since in our history, and yet the Cumann na nGaedheal Government, in power from 1923 to 1932, governed strongly. From 1932, except for the six years of inter-Party Government from 1948 to 1951 and from 1954 to 1957, I do not suppose Fianna Fáil in their first 15 years of office and in their final 11 years would like to describe themselves as having been a weak Government.
They cannot have it both ways. They cannot blame the PR system and say it makes for weak Government and at the same time, take pride in the fact that they have been in office for 30 out of the past 36 years without accusing themselves of being a weak Government. In other words, PR does not make a weak Government. It can make a strong Government or a weak one. The people who make strong and weak Governments are those who sit in the Government Benches and in the Opposition; the system does not make them. It is the actions of the Government in power and the action of Deputies opposite whether Labour, Fine Gael or Independents that make a Government strong or weak, that strange interaction, listening to arguments put forward, hints and various things coming across the floor of the House, sometimes coming in the form of questions, sometimes in the form of debate, even the people who sometimes very wrongly and wickedly try to bend Standing Orders to their own benefit and perhaps fall foul of the Ceann Comhairle in doing so, show a Government which is alert to public opinion, that there must be more in this matter than meets the eye if the particular Deputy risks being hurled out of the House because of it and that perhaps it is something to which more attention should be paid. It may indicate that there are points of view that should be heard and studied to see if they are worth turning into legislation.
That procedure comes more easily with the system of proportional representation. I and other people believe that, quite apart from the effect that this may have—I do not believe it will happen—on the possible abolition of PR, we are moulding the PR system to ourselves and, in its strange way, it is moulding us. We are different in outlook from people elected in one-member constituencies who, as I said earlier, tend to see things in black and white while we tend to see them in gradations, shades. Most of us here are adult enough to know that things are rarely black and white but mostly grey in colour. That is not cynical—far from it. It is simply the truth.
There are always factors which modify and factors which change and we also know, as the ancients said, "Truth lives at the bottom of a well". It is very difficult to get at the truth. Mind you, we have a lot to be proud of in the Government we have had here since the formation of the State. It is a Government—I am not talking now of the Government Party; I am talking of all Governments here—that is humane. We have not got any savage penal code. Nobody wants that. We have abolished the death sentence. I am not sure whether we have actually taken it out or whether we just do not do it any longer, but at any rate we do not do it any longer. Our legislation shows that the Government are very humane in their approach to things. We have an army and we have the police force and we have discipline and so on, but we do not get cases of very severe discipline coming before us as Deputies. That type of thing does not happen very much in Ireland. We have not got any forms of repressive legislation. The women have had votes for a very long time here—before the State was founded, I think. We do try to treat widows, orphans and such people as humanely and as well as we can. I am not trying to say that everything is perfect—far from it—but all that sort of thing is listened to sympathetically here and a great deal of that comes from this system. We are hardly aware of the effect the system has on our attitude to a whole lot of things.
You will remember the outery there was about the export of horses from this country. People felt very deeply about that, people from all walks of life, people who never handled a horse in their lives or never sat on a horse's back—in other words, not just people who were interested in horses as hunters or anything like that but just human beings who hated to see cruelty to animals. Eventually this country, I am glad to say, brought in legislation preventing that. It hit the pockets of some of the Irish people.
