Last evening I opened with just a few brief remarks on the fact that no factual information has been placed before the voters to enable them to make a decision on this very fundamental issue that confronts us. Personally, I have no axe to grind in this matter. Neither has any of my fellow Senators from the universities. Surely it gives rise to thought that the five of us who have spoken, endeavouring to live up to the academic traditions of universities, endeavouring to live up to the tradition of scientific inquiry and impartial presentation of results, are unanimous in this issue? It is not I think that we are unanimous on the virtues of P.R. or on the case against the straight vote but that we are unanimous in the view that enough information is not available to enable the electors to make a decision on this question.
We ourselves feel we are only scratching the surface. I have spoken about this matter with quite a few of my fellow-members. We have spent time endeavouring to go through the systems in other countries, endeavouring to see the pros and cons. We are only beginning. We feel it is absolutely vital that this important issue of changing the Constitution should be approached on a non-Party and impartial basis. Nothing can establish that more than to have before us a White Paper of 40 to 50 or maybe 100 pages giving a whole factual analysis of systems in other countries and making reasonable predictions as to how changes here might react on our system.
We have made some excellent beginnings. We have got the Capital Investment Advisory Committee which has done excellent work. We have all accepted their recommendations in the non-Party and impartial spirit in which they have been given. I might refer to the recent White Paper by the Government. My first reaction on reading it through was that it was more political window-dressing and that we had heard all that before—until I got Mr. Whitaker's excellent Survey on Economic Development. Then the whole thing took on a completely new outlook. Here were the facts and figures that led up to the recommendation in that excellent book. Besides, I and everybody else reading it had confidence in the objectivity of the man who produced that work and the machinery behind the production of the work.
That, I submit, is what we need here and until it comes I feel that, far from being criticised for trying to deny voters their rights, we, the independent Senators here, should be praised for standing for the rights of voters, that is, the rights of voters to know intelligently and to be told impartially where they are going and where they are being led and to ensure that they are not simply being led by catch cries about a Coalition Centre Party or a Coalition inter-Party or being told that Hitler did this and Mussolini did something else. In this scientific day and age, our people demand something better. The young men of Ireland demand it—the young men on whom the future rests and, please God, if they do not get what they demand they will at least observe the well-known principle in liturgy. As a priest said to me recently: "In liturgy, if you do not know where you are going then stay where you are."
I want to proceed briefly to illustrate some of the many ideas and the many things which it is necessary to ascertain. I have some tentative facts here; I am not satisfied completely with them but they show that this question is a far bigger one than its treatment by many speakers would suggest. You just cannot reduce it down to the position that one is right and the other is wrong. As seen by all thinkers on the subject there are two functions in an election. One is to ensure a Government that can carry on; the other is to ensure representation. There is quite a conflict as to which deserves the most emphasis. It is claimed that the straight vote will ensure a stronger form of Government, exaggerating majorities. To that extent, if that claim is correct, where a country needs absolutely resolute Government, because of a disturbed condition, perhaps the straight vote has quite a bit on its side. On the other hand, P.R. gives all reasonable shades of opinion a chance of expression in Parliament so that Parliament can bring the very best ideas to bear on its problems and as far as possible strive for what is the wish of the majority.
That is the problem of representation and I think here we have a vital factor that seems to have been missed —at least I have not seen it referred to up to now, namely, that we are calling for two Parties, a Government and an Opposition who can take over when we get tired of the Government. I think there is nearly agreement on that on all sides — to have at least a Government and an alternative Government. In other countries the lines of division are sharper than here. In France, Italy and so on, very often the issue is clerical or anti-clerical, a question of, "shall we banish religion from the schools or not; shall we drive out the religious schools?" Thank God we have not got those issues here. We are all united on that. We all have the Christian tradition and the Christian outlook on such matters.
Other countries are divided on the question as to whether they shall have Socialism or not. Again, thank God, we have been spared a great deal of that. In addition, you would find other points of diversion such as the pros and cons of monarchy, and all the rest but here we found the point of division in the civil war—the question of which side you were on. That has acted for a number of years to give us two groups and in the language of students of politics it polarises the electorate, draws them to two poles. The young Ireland of to-day is not, however, going to have such out-dated polarisation. Young Ireland recognises that the civil war was an unfortunate and unhappy period of our existence and that the best we can do is draw a veil over it and proceed on to the future.
We cannot use the civil war as a means of polarisation of Parties but this issue has blown up — Coalition or single-Party Government. You have had the Taoiseach's violent denunciation of the idea of Coalition Government; yet the electorate has seen fit to replace one by the other. You had a single-Party Government up to 1948; inter-Party, or Coalition Govment, from 1948 to 1951; back again to the single-Party Government, on to the Coalition and back again to single-Party Government. Would it not be a happy day for this country if you could polarise the political thinking of this country for the next 20 years in that way? By all means let Fianna Fáil hold on to their conception of single-Party Government — and they do a great deal of good for the country by that—but equally let them recognise that Coalition, or inter-Party Government, is quite an alternative type of Government and forms the other pole of our electoral systems. If we do that we may get what we are seeking, something that will polarise our electorate and give us stability and a reasonable amount of continuity in our electoral systems.
I want to establish now the case that there are many things that we do not know about systems in other countries. Many false analogies that have come into the debate call for an impartial study. To begin with I shall take this question of P.R. Listening to many of the speeches here, and reading many of the speeches in the other House, one could be pardoned for concluding that the idea of proportion, and P.R., had escaped many of the members. In fact, there are no fewer than 300 variations of P.R. We in our present system are nearer to the majority form of government than we are to the true ideal of P.R.
P.R. springs from the mathematical idea of giving all groups a say in the government, or at least getting their voices heard in Parliament. The earlier advocates of this measure were idealists. They wanted to ensure that no group whatsoever was excluded. That meant that, in very many cases, the country as a whole was treated as one single constituency so that any candidate in this country, if elections were held on that basis, who could command around 1 per cent. of the vote could be elected to Parliament. That system is at present in operation in Holland and in Israel, to which I shall come back later. We are far from that here with our preponderance of three-seat constituencies. After all, in a three-seat constituency the quota is one quarter, or 25 per cent. of the vote. To get elected you must get 25 per cent. of the vote in a fair-sized region. Certainly you are no longer representing a weak minority when you get that. In fact, you have quite a sizable following in your locality.
I want now to take the various countries and make just a few remarks on each. I might mention that that excellent study was completed less than two years ago in the University of London by a distinguished student of University College, Cork, Dr. Cornelius O'Leary. He did an excellent study of electoral systems and on it he was rewarded with the highest honour the university could confer. It followed from the previous work of Professor James Hogan on election and representation. I think it is almost essential for anybody to discuss this intelligently to have at least read and digested Professor Hogan's book and, if possible, to have read Dr. O'Leary's excellent work. It is the only way that one can see the issues that are at stake.
The country to introduce P.R. first was Belgium, in 1899. It was followed by Sweden in 1907, by Denmark in 1915 and Holland in 1917. Germany and Italy followed in 1919, and so on. It is of comparatively recent growth. It came at the same time as two other distinct happenings, universal suffrage and the rise of Socialism, the days of Labour banding together to advance its rights. We come then to study the history of Europe at that period without making full allowance for those two factors. The opening of the franchise, in fact, is one of the most unpredictable of all things in a country, because you may have a large number who had been deprived of the vote in many cases, or who were illiterate, suddenly having this weapon of recording their votes thrust into their hands. How would they use it? It takes years to develop political sense and it is no wonder that there have been erratic happenings in the working of the system.
Let us take the first-mentioned country, Belguim. Prior to 1899, Belgium operated the usual type of majority system. It was a list system and they had a second ballot which gave a chance for those at the bottom of the poll to drop out, thereby releasing the voters to transfer their votes to some other candidate more likely to be elected. That, after all, is the forerunner of the transferable vote in P.R. In fact, I had a rather interesting session with a strong exponent of the majority system recently. I discussed with him this election of candidates at a Party convention where the object is to select three candidates from, say, six in the field. He was quite adamant that it was done by straight voting. "What do you do?" I asked? "We vote, and then we eliminate the sixth man and vote-again.""Yes," I said, "and then you eliminate the fifth man?""Yes," he replied, "and we vote again." What is that but the transferable vote you have in P.R., except that you do not go back to the voter? You simply ask-him the question: "If your first choice is to be eliminated, what will we do with your vote?" And he tells you there and then what to do with his vote. What is the difference between that and the system of election used at Party conventions? I take it that you have such a system in the national Party executives and in the county councils, as the system by which you select rate collectors and make any other appointments that still remain with the county councils.
To go on — Belgium had two Parties, Catholics and Liberals. These continued after P.R., except for the rise of a Socialist Party which would have come in any case. These three Parties continued right through to 1918 when the Catholics and Liberals combined. After the First World War, the Catholic Party lost its majority and never regained it, but it has continued ever since in coalitions. There have been coalitions of the three major Parties, the Catholics, Liberals and Socialists, or else coalitions of two of the major Parties, usually Catholics and Liberals. By all accounts, Belgium has prospered and has got on quite well.
The test of government is not the power of the Taoiseach or the Prime Minister; it is the development in the country itself. It is the increase in its population, the development of its resources, the place it holds in the world; and who are we to criticise countries like Belgium, Holland, Denmark or Norway? They have done what we could not do. They have increased their population; they have been able to provide bread and work for anyone who wished to stay in his native country, something which we, after 30 years, have not been able to do. Of course, anyone experienced in government—in fact, anybody in any committee — would like to get his own way all the time and would like to be able to count on an absolute majority but "by their fruits you shall know them." That is the only way we can judge how a Government will carry on in the future. Let us take the yardsticks of unemployment, emigration and education. Let us compare the advance in education in Belgium and Holland with what we have done in 30 years. We subscribe to the fact that education is the key to development of a modern nation; yet we can get £1,000,000 at the drop of a hat for the extension of the runways at Shannon Airport, while we cannot get an extra £1,000 a year to provide adult education for the young farmers of Munster. That is our progress and that is what we have got with majority government.
I am just making the point that we must be careful; we can judge Governments only by their fruits and by their impact on the country as a whole and, taken by those standards, Belgium has achieved considerable success. Since pre-war — and pre-war the issue was the same — there are three Parties in Belgium and the Communist Party has not made any significant advance there.
We go on to Scandinavia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark and the main outstanding feature there has been the gradual rise of Socialism. It has largely been tempered by coalitions. Perhaps, that has been very distasteful to the Socialists as a group. They would like to be able to push ahead with all their nationalisation and other Socialist acts. They have been held back by P.R. and Western Europe may thank God for having done that for us, because the Socialism of to-day is much more conservative and staid than the Socialism of 20 or 30 years ago. They see now that nationalisation by itself is not a panacea and they have been tempered by the other Parties in Europe. If we ever have a Socialist Government here, although I, for one, have no desire whatever to see it, I pray it will have to spend many years in apprenticeship in coalitions before it ever emerges as an overall majority Government, and I think everybody here who is interested in the welfare of the country will pray with me in that.
In Sweden the rise of the Socialist Party was through coalition with the Agrarian Party in the 1930's, but even then, when the Socialist Party attained an overall majority, it continued in coalition with the Agrarian Party, proving that it was in no way dissatisfied with the results of the previous years. It was mentioned here quite a lot that they are thinking about changing their system in Sweden. In fact they did change it in 1952. They took the first essential step to change; they established an impartial, unbiassed commission to review the whole question, and it was only on the results of that report that they acted. They were worried. What were they worried about? They were worried about the fact that they thought P.R., as they had it with relatively small constituencies, was rather unfair to the smaller Parties, that the quotas were being set too high and that the smaller Parties were not getting sufficient representation. The report suggested going more proportional, so that smaller Parties could get better representation. When the report was furnished Parliament did not go the whole way with it but went part of the way. They reduced the quotas and arranged for the utilisation of surpluses. They also arranged for preferential voting within the Party list.
That is really an outstanding thing. We have that type of preferential voting here in our multiple-member constituencies. The Party puts up three members and the electorate proceed to elect maybe one, maybe two from the Party list. That was their reform in 1952. We understand they have another commission sitting at present — a proper, logical, scientific, rational approach — and we shall see the outcome of that, too. However, one thing you can certainly bet is that it is not a question of jumping from a fair measure of P.R. to the straight majority in single-member constituencies.
We go on to Norway. P.R. was first introduced around 1917 and from then until 1927 some of the Parties were split and you got several Parties in that period. The split healed in 1927 and since then Socialism has increased in Norway so that it has had a hand in most Norwegian Governments and it actually attained a majority representation of 85 seats out of 152 in 1949, and that with 48 per cent. of the electorate.
We have heard a great deal about Denmark as a wonderful example to us in agriculture, and rightly so. For years we have heard about the Danish production figures. We have heard about the Danish advisory service but, above all, we have heard about the Danish co-operative movement and the fact that the Danish Government knows exactly where to draw the line, that it knows what to leave to the people to do for themselves. Its function is, you might say, to encourage the people to do the job for themselves. Their co-operatives have done that and I need not give fact or figure to prove their tremendous success in that. Yet Denmark has four nation-wide Parties; it has since 1918 had P.R. and has been ruled by various types of Coalition Governments since then and, judged by their performance, highly successful Governments. I only wish our Governments since 1918 could match the record of the Danish Governments since then.
To make things more extreme, in Denmark so anxious are they for representation, that they allot 44 additional seats to those that failed to get representation in the elections. In other words they have a far more extreme form of P.R. than we have here to-day and yet they are perfectly happy with it. The secret of their success is that every parliamentarian in Denmark is a Dane first. He is for the welfare of his country and he assumes that the other members, whatever Party they are in, are actuated by the best motives for the welfare of the country. They agree on ends, ends for the prosperity and welfare of Denmark and its people. They differ in means and that should be our approach, too.
Speaking of coalitions themselves, the greatest coalition in the whole country is the Civil Service and it is doing a very good job. You have the various Departments all trying to get their own schemes through, trying to get money for their own projects, and the Department of Finance is like the Taoiseach sitting in the centre coordinating them and getting them to compromise. The word "compromise" is used as if it were an intrinsically evil word whereas the whole business of life and living here is one of compromise.
