Taoiseach plans referendum on Seanad reform

Victor

ishmael whale wrote:

I haven't seen any figures recently, but I can recall at one stage an article saying that a high percentage of TDs were teachers, accountants and lawyers.

Now, yes, but remember the revolution was a peoples revolution.

PS Professions is code for protestants.

FTA69

Sparks wrote:

What's the difference between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" then?

Seems to me, semantics is a rather important part of communication, and only those people who don't actually know what the word "semantics" means think that it isn't, or try to say an argument is worthless because it's "just semantics"...

When one purposely manipulates another's comments to give the impression that they are conveying a nonsensical view, that is the unnecessary exploitation of semantics.

To answer your question though, the word "terrorist" is defined as "one who engages in violence for political advantage", by that logic the Allies in WW2 were "terrorists" as they engaged in "political violence", in fact, all soldiers that ever fought a war or "terrorists". In everyday use it is a derogatory slur used to denote psychopaths and criminally motivated evil people. A "freedom fighter" is one who fights against an unjust situation.

Sparks

FTA69 wrote:

When one purposely manipulates another's comments to give the impression that they are conveying a nonsensical view, that is the unnecessary exploitation of semantics.

No, it's not. When you manipulate someone else's words to give an impression not originally intended, it's called misquoting. Semantics is the study of what a given statement actually means.

To answer your question though, the word "terrorist" is defined as "one who engages in violence for political advantage" <snip> In everyday use it is a derogatory slur used to denote psychopaths and criminally motivated evil people.

Really? Because everyone I know uses terms like "psychos" or "nutters" and "thugs" for those groups, not "terrorists". We don't talk about the "terrorists" who mug people on friday night on O'Connell street, we talk about the "thugs" who do so.

A "freedom fighter" is one who fights against an unjust situation.

And if he or she does so by using violence to try to force a political change to correct the situation? (And that's wholly disregarding the question of who judges if a situation is unjust or not).

Victor

So are Senators terrorists or freedom fighters? Stop going off topic.

Poker_Peter

We do live in a representative democracy, that's what the Dail is - a place where democracy in all it's flaws works away. The seanad should be a place where debate isn't ruled by short term political opportunism which the dail suffers from so badly. To me, that means as few 'professional' politicans as possible, and also removing all direct public elections to get rid of the pandering effect that the Dail personifys. I don't agree with university graduates having a vote for the seanad, that's certainly flawed. Have the university heads, NGOs, etc etc, directly nominate people they'd like to see in.

Hmmm. While I agree with what you say about not making the Seanad the mirror image of the Dail, in order to avoid undue populism and/or bad, rushed decisions, I think that some element of democratic input, together with rules similar to those of the US Senate e.g. no time-limit allowed on debates unless 60% of senators agree, has to be put in place. The Senate should also get more powers. We need to avoid crazy laws going through, so we don't want party-hacks dominating the upper house.

My solution to squaring this circle is to require that in Seanad elections, all the candidates should be required not to stand on behalf of a political party. They should all be Independents. Also, political-parties should agree not to campaign on behalf of any of the candidates. That would help produce an upper house free (well a lot more so than the present Seanad) of political interference. More teeth are also needed for the upper-house, since power comes from the people and the change to an elected body elected by universal-suffrage sort of entitles that body to exert greater power. So give the Seanad power to amend proposed legislation, like the British House of Lords, while letting the proposed law go through after 2 years regardless of what the Seanad thinks.

In Britain, the House of Lords has used similar powers to successfully persuade the British Government to make substantial changes in proposed laws. I think it could work well here too.

Lennoxschips

At the moment Ireland has only one branch of government.

The Seanad has no power and the President is a glorified ribbon cutter.

Whoever holds the majority in the Dail has the power to do whatever they want. There's nothing in place to create stability if some Aryan nutcases ever came to power in the Dail. We need something. Either give the Seanad more power or the President. My preference goes to giving the Seanad more power, as investing too much power in one person can't be a good thing.

My idea would be to let parties run for the Seanad on a national basis. In other words, no constituencies. If 34% of the people vote for a given party then that party gets 34% of the seats etc. Hold the Seanad elections in the years in between the elections for the Dail, then you can gauge public opinion more accurately. It would stop parties from doing as they please knowing that the next elections are always a long time away.

frodi

Declaring my interest first of all, I'm one of the 5% with a vote in seanad election (TCD graduate)
No point in having party repesentation in seanad as this means that it acts act mirror or rubber stamp to dail. Have either popular vote with no party repesentation allowed or selected electorate. Personally I feel that a selected electorate is discrimitatory so I prefer popular election at same time as dail election with no dual canditure allowed and no party repesentation allowed. Certainly no 12 taoseach nominees allowed, the seanad has to be independant.

monument

Sand wrote:

Democracy is a good thing, but you can have too much of it.

I'm just reading that as bad democracy (or a semi, not too democrat democracy) is a good thing. In other words a government which calls it self a democracy, but isn’t very democrat at all.

gandalf wrote:

Personally I also feel (as I have posted before) we should cut the numbers of TD's drastically and give more power to the local authorities.

I'm not sure about a lot you said, not even sure about cutting the numbers of TDs [I'll have a look at your other thread], but couldn’t agree more with the idea of more power to local authorities, from CCs down.

gandalf wrote:

It depends with the right mix of groups it should reflect what greater society wants.

Yeah, but more often then not corporate, or other interest groups don’t really reflect what greater society wants.

Lennoxschips wrote:

The Seanad has no power and the President is a glorified ribbon cutter.

In addition, some would say our current President talks a bit of dangerous gobbledegook.

Lennoxschips wrote:

My idea would be to let parties run for the Seanad on a national basis. In other words, no constituencies. If 34% of the people vote for a given party then that party gets 34% of the seats etc. Hold the Seanad elections in the years in between the elections for the Dail, then you can gauge public opinion more accurately. It would stop parties from doing as they please knowing that the next elections are always a long time away.

Interesting, but I don’t like where you’re going with ‘parties’ – with individuals, linked to a party, or not, would be more suitable.