Michael D struggling with presidential workload.

In our legal framework, the President is one of the guardians of our constitutional order and the constitutional integrity of legislation. That's a rather important job even if some consider it as an impediment to the executive of the state doing whatever it pleases whenever it pleases.

That he's making comment on the volumes of legislation being put under his nose before a parliamentary recess is proof-positive he's doing his job and takes the job of interrogating legislation seriously - and not acting as a human rubber stamp, as the government are trying to treat him.

9 separate pieces of legislation to review in one day before Dail holibobs is extraordinary.

Legislation enjoys the presumption of being congruent with the constitution unless decreed otherwise by the Supreme Court. The President has those precise powers of either referral to the Supreme Court (the experts so to speak) or a referral to the Council of State to peruse the legislation before kicking it to the SC.

The President is the first citizen of the State, there is no requirement for him to be a legal savant no more than there is the Minister of Justice (and lots of them most certainly have not been, including the current incumbent). To require him (or her) to be one, or to strip him/her of that power would to interfere with the finely balanced separation of powers and the ultimate primacy of the people in our constitutional makeup. We're not run by a self-selecting coteire of legal boffins drawn from the monoculture of the Law Library, we're a democratic republic where the people are sovereign (perhaps uniquely so in Western democracies, with the exception of Switzerland).

The President is an incredibly important part of that democratic balancing act, and the office deserves to be respected.

I think you'd be surprised at the result of such a referendum. Quite apart from miscalculating how Irish people generally feel about the office of President, it's an entirely dangerous idea that would regularly place the Supreme Court in conflict with the Executive, and further disempower the people.

There may come a day when a deeply illiberal government may take the reigns of the executive, and start stacking legislation on top of each other that will pose a direct threat to our freedoms and the health of our democracy, you'd quickly start regretting not having a President with our freedoms in the direct line of fire of an executive out of control - which is the danger of your proposal.

The Seanad, and the bizarre calcified constituencies, could well do with reform - but I always regarded the attempt to do away with it as a bizarre and actually quite sinister proposal by Enda Kenny.

The degree to which executive power is concentrated at the cabinet table is already stark enough. It's well within the gift of our constitutional framework to widen this (particularly on a regional/local government level). So that Inda wanted to lop-off of (an admittedly flawed but not beyond reform) a part of democratic oversight should have raised alarm bells. We crow about populism a lot on this site, that was a distilled populist move. And perversely, certain political actors like Regina Doherty who wanted to abolish the upper house now sit as speaker of the very same house when she got her P45 from the good people of Meath East.

Let's pull down the constitutional order on the opinion of a surly cabbie then. In fact, let's just put opinionated taxi drivers in charge of the country altogether.

No it wasn't

Yes, the constitution empowers and quite literally qualifies them to exercise that power at their absolute discretion. I don't understand what you want from the President - do you wish for him to go back to college or something? Our Minister for Justice is a laywoman with a degree in journalism. Her stand-in Humphries is no legal eagle, does this concern you also?

Do you think the President and the Minister for Justice both rattle around in their mahogany offices without access to advice on matters of legal importance?

EDIT: And a President could indeed elect to be more interventionist, the executive cannot tell him/her what do on matters such as these in the least. We haven't had such an interventionist President (with the exception of Ó Dálaigh who was bullied out of office), but the power is at his / her fingertips. A government can't flip a President the finger and tell them 'sign this today or else.' That's not factual.

The President is doing no such thing, we've seen some sharp work pulled in legislation with regards to the government doing whatever it please and not a word from the incumbent carpet bagger until now.

He does have staff for this purpose. I'm aware he had an advisor with a legal and academic background from UCC on staff in the Presidential office for instance. He also has his very own General Secretary advising him.