Tag Archive for 'Fianna Fail'

A Perfect Opportunity

Published on 20 February, 2010. 0 Comments

A couple of months ago, I blogged about the possibility of an experienced outsider being brought into the cabinet as Minister for Trade, Enterprise and Employment (Jim O’Hara being that outsider). Through the various twists and turns of Irish politics over the past week or so, a sequence of events has given Brian Cowen the perfect opportunity to make just such a shake-up:

  1. Willie O’Dea’s resignation from the cabinet
    With O’Dea gone from the Department of Defense, a cabinet reshuffle is now inevitable. While many are speculating that Cowen will simply appoint one of the junior ministers to fill O’Dea’s post, he hasn’t reshuffled his cabinet since taking office in 2008 (in a very different economic climate), and now would be the perfect time to do so. What’s more, with a vacant seat on the cabinet, an independent minister could be brought in without having to relegate any of the sitting Fianna Fail ministers to the backbenches. This could help diffuse any animosity that the FF parliamentary party might have about bringing in someone from outside Fianna Fail.
  2. Deirdre de Burca’s resignation from the Seanad
    As well as an opening in the cabinet, there’s now an opening in the Seanad, thanks to Deirdre de Burca. As she occupied one of the 11 Seanad seats reserved for nominees of the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen can now appoint whoever he likes, at as short notice as he likes, to replace her. Indeed, he could nominate someone on Monday morning, and by Monday evening they could be sitting at the cabinet table. Of course, as the seat was previously held by a Green, the Green Party will undoubtedly want another of their own to replace her. Cowen would do well to remind them that Fianna Fail recently elected Niall O’Brolchain as an additional Green senator to replace Labour’s Alan Kelly, and that Cowen’s appointee would be independent, rather than from Fianna Fail. Of course, if that didn’t work, a promise of an additional junior minister post for the Greens in the reshuffle would probably do the trick.
  3. Mary Coughlan’s cock-up over the Ryanair hangar proposal
    Mary Coughlan has made quite a few mistakes and gaffes during her tenure as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, but, at a time when unemployment is at its highest in a generation, her inability to secure 500 jobs that seemed to be offered on a plate by Ryanair is the first one to really make her position look untenable. What’s more, after O’Dea’s resignation, any further revelation in the Coughlan-Ryanair saga could have catastrophic consequences for the government. It would be best for Cowen to reassign her to a different portfolio as part of a wider cabinet reshuffle, which would prevent any arguments over her handling of Ryanair’s proposals from becoming a resigning matter. In order to illustrate that her movement out of the portfolio is simply part of the reshuffle and not a demotion, she could keep the position of Tanaiste in her new role.
  4. Greece’s future is still shaky
    Within the the next week, Greece is expected to try to raise up to €5 billion euros from international bond markets, which will be a big test of market confidence in their finances. If Greece struggles through this test, renewed pressure will come not only on them, but also on the other ‘peripheral countries’ in the eurozone, including Ireland. Brian Lenihan’s budget in December bought us a bit of leeway compared to Greece, Spain and Portugal, but we can’t count on that goodwill from the markets to last forever, and now would be a very good time to differentiate ourselves once again, by bringing in an outside expert to a major economic post on the cabinet. By picking the right person, and handling the international press well, any potential fallout from Greece’s problems could be neatly defected, keeping our own borrowing within reasonable costs.

I had previously suggested Jim O’Hara to take over the role of Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and I still think that he would be a very good choice. Of course, so long as Cowen were to avoid appointing anyone who was in any way involved in either the property or finance industries, there are quite a few successful Irish businessmen and businesswomen who would fit the bill, including some of the members of the Taoiseach’s own innovation taskforce. The important thing is to appoint someone who would be respected by the international business community, with any experience in high-tech exports as an added bonus.

Whoever Cowen were to choose, he now has a perfect opportunity to create a rare piece of good news for the government, and to end a dreadful couple of weeks for his party (and Irish politics as a whole) on a high note. Of course, whether he has the fortitude to make good on this opportunity is a different matter entirely…

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Just How Proportional Is Proportional Representation?

Published on 11 December, 2009. 0 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing on electoral reform, based on a submission I sent into the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution recently. You can find the full series by clicking here.

When Proportional Representation by Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV) was first established as Ireland’s electoral system in 1921, it was presented as an alternative to the first-past-the-post  (FPTP) system employed in the UK. The main reason that the new system was adopted was that, as its name suggests, it is more proportional than FPTP, in that the number of seats each party wins should be roughly proportional to the share of the vote they receive. While PR-STV has certainly improved from FPTP in that regard (not a difficult feat, as FPTP is particularly disproportional), it is worth noting that Ireland was the first country to implement PR-STV in national elections, and hence there was little evidence at the time it was chosen with which to analyze its proportionality. With almost a century of elections now held under the system, however, there’s now a considerable amount of data with which to examine whether PR-STV fulfils its purpose of proportionality.

The above graph shows the correlation between the proportion of national first-preference votes (FPV) a party receives and the number of seats it wins as a result. It is based on the results of every party in every general election held since 1981 (the first 166-member Dáil), and each point on the graph represents a party’s result in one of those elections. The dashed red line represents a perfectly proportional allocation of seats according to national vote.

What’s immediately visible about our current PR-STV system from the graph is how it benefits the larger parties compared to a perfectly proportional system. In only one outlying case did either of the state’s two large parties win less seats than would have been allocated proportionally (FG, 2002), and in every other election they received a bonus from the PR-STV system. For Fianna Fail in the 1997 and 2002 elections, this bonus gave them an extra 12 and 13 TDs, respectively, over their representation in a purely proportional system.

The PR-STV system, as currently implemented, likewise disadvantages smaller parties.  The second graph is enlarged to only show the results of parties that received less than 8% of the national FPV. It can be seen that in the considerable majority of cases, parties in this bracket win less seats than a proportional system would allocate them. Furthermore, there are often large variations in the number of seats won on a similar proportion of the vote. For example, between the 1992 and 1997 elections, the Progressive Democrats went from 10 to 4 seats, despite receiving exactly the same proportion of the national vote on both occasions (4.7%). In a perfectly proportional system, they would have won 8 seats in each election.

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