There will shortly be three tribunals of inquiry into allegations or suspicions of wrongdoing in public office. The McCracken tribunal is still in being and will shortly resume to consider the issue of costs. The Moriarty tribunal will soon get going to investigate further payments to politicians and the planning tribunal will get under way soon to examine the background and ramifications of the £30,000 donation to Ray Burke in June 1989 and an assortment of other related matters. What is extraordinary about the proliferation of such tribunals is not just the insight it gives us into the pathology of Irish politics, but also the confirmation it establishes of how weak and irrelevant is the institution constitutionally charged with making public office holders accountable: Dail Eireann.
We live in what may be called "an executive State", a State dominated by the executive arm of government, unaccountable in any meaningful way to any other body, including the legislature. The government dominates the Dail, it determines its agenda, ail, it sponsors and directs legislation through the Dail, it determines the extent, if at all, to which it should be accountable to the Dail.
Only one substantial Bill has been sponsored other than by the government in the last several decades, the Family Law Act of 1989, sponsored by Alan Shatter. All other legislation has been instigated by the government of the day. Ministers regularly offer to consider whether the government should or should not accept proposed amendments by Dail deputies, acknowledging the government calls the shots as far as the Dail is concerned.
There are two mechanisms which supposedly hold the government accountable to the Dail: Question Time and the committee system. The various "reforms" of Question Time instituted over the last several years have failed to confront the central difficulty: the ease with which ministers simply evade questions and, at times, simply refuse to answer. There is no mechanism to force ministers to answer to the Dail, other than in the most perfunctory sense.
The committee system is no better. True, some of the committees can demand papers and call witnesses but, again, ministers can refuse to attend or to answer questions. The attempt of the Dail select committee to examine the background to the fall of the Albert Reynolds government in November 1994 underlined the impotence of the committee system.
Actually that committee worked well as far as the questioning of witnesses was concerned, but there it ended. It felt constitutionally debarred from drawing any conclusions from the evidence, and there is little reason to believe that had it not felt so debarred the traditional demands of party discipline and loyalty would have allowed anything other than banalities.
Even the beef tribunal report acknowledged that if ministers had given straight and forthcoming answers to Dail questions many of the controversies related to the beef industry and, particularly, to the export credit insurance scheme, could have been avoided.
Similarly if over the years Charles Haughey had been obliged to answer obvious questions about the sources of his wealth we would not have needed the McCracken and Moriarty tribunals. And if effective inquiry mechanisms had operated in the Dail, Michael Lowry's affairs could have been investigated there also rather than by a tribunal.
The Dail is little better than a (mixed) metaphorical cross between a talking shop and a rubber stamp. This is because the government of the day depends on a disciplined Dail majority to keep it in office and the party system duly obliges.
There are only two ways of dealing with this, either to provide another accountability mechanism or to immunise the government's survival from the Dail arithmetic, after a government has been elected.
It would be possible for a reformed Seanad to hold the government of the day accountable, if it were given the powers to do so. But first the composition of the Seanad would have to changed radically. One way that might be done would be to provide for direct elections to the Seanad for a fixed-term duration (e.g. six years), from the same constituencies used for the European elections. This would result in a Seanad very differently composed from the Dail - far more representatives from smaller parties, for instance - and even those elected from the major parties would be much more free of party whips than present.
Were ministers and some other public officeholders required constitutionally to be fully answerable to such a Seanad, then accountability would have a chance of working.
Alternatively, it might be possible to reform the Dail, but a prerequisite of such reform would be that governments were elected for a fixed term, no longer dependent on the Dail for continuation in office, save in exceptional circumstances.
But amidst all the hand-wringing about standards in public office and the low esteem in which politicians are held, there is no political will to change the present system radically.
Indeed even the expert review group on the Constitution (the Whitaker group), which reported last year, evinced no willingness to confront these issues either. (An excellent critique of these aspects of the review group report is contained in The Executive State in Ireland by Alan Ward in the 1996/1997 issue of Administration.)
Governments covet their dominance of parliament and will exert that dominance to perpetuate it.
Bertie Ahern's proposal for a standing Ethics Commission which would oversee ethical standards of politicians is well intentioned. But it evades the problem of accountability generally in the exercise of government power, while implicitly acknowledging the impotence of parliament.
It is probably the case that some sort of standing commission is required to monitor the interaction of money and politics, to monitor how much money politicians and parties receive and from where they get it. And to be effective this commission would require investigatory powers and powers of initiative. It should not require a specific complaint for it to make investigations. But it is not enough. The parliamentary function of holding governments accountable has to be made to operate.
And separate from all this is the fundamental unfairness built in to how we finance the political system, which has got to be confronted. As has been argued repeatedly in this column, for so long as private money funds the political system, so long will the political system be biased in favour of the wealthy. The only way out of this is for the political system (i.e. the parties and election campaigns) to be funded entirely and exclusively from public funds and on an equal basis.
Politicians correctly perceive the public antipathy to this idea. But surely the purpose of politics is to persuade people to what one considers to be the right idea, rather than to succumb to the prevailing consensus, all the more so when the basic fairness of society is at stake?