General Irish politics discussion thread

Yes, I know 6 seaters aren't allowed due to legislation.

What I don't want is more 3 sesters due to pop growth.

I have seen DL and WEX mentioned already.

The increase in 3 seater constituencies, from 9 to 13, will make it harder for smaller parties. One of the benefits of our multi-seat electoral system is that representation is afforded to small parties and minority voices. Does this increase in 3 seater constituencies limit this

Given our rising population, it won't be long before the boundaries have to be changed again.

I don't see a need for a small country like ours to have in excess of 200 TDs for example.

Dublin West is now a 5 seater and enters the possibility of Leo bringing in a running mate or else a second Sinn Fein seat.

The Boundary Commission also doesn't see the need for 200+ TDs; they have gone for close to the minimum number. But, inevitably, doing that means that less time will pass before population increases require a further revision.

We won't need 200+ TDs until the population exceeds 6 million.

Leo is from the area and his parents still live there.

D15 is so diverse anyway. I'm not sure people are that bothered about where the TD is from or where they live.

I get the impression this is more of a rural concern.

Ivan reckons the Shinners should gain 12 of the 14 seats. Interesting times ahead.

De Valera did. We need one per 30k population max unless we amend the constitution

The would be expecting to gain rather a lot more than 12 in total.

Ruth Coppinger could get back in again as well.

Senator Emer Currie will be Leo's running-mate/replacement.

Mary McCamley/John Walsh will run for Labour.

Paul Donnelly will have either Natalie Treacy or Breda Hanaphy as his running mate, as he'll hardly have the wife who took his council seat running with him.

It won't be a huge ticket as FF and Greens will only run one, and there aren't significant independent councillors around.

Leo Varadkar and Emer Currie, Jack Chambers, Paul Donnelly plus one, Ruth Coppinger, Roderic O'Gorman and Labour make for eight candidates for five seats. Of course local elections could throw up something surprising.

Its all been done before on another thread, but the idea of political repreaentatives scaling with population will have to come to an end soon enough.

Your vote carries as much weight on affairs in dail eireann whether there were 100 or 1000 TDs. In either case your say is worth about 1/5mil

CNC has its own comparatively strong Labour vote but also has its own comparatively strong candidate.

Sherlock will have to go with Mallow.

Very possibly. In which case, if we think 200+ TDs is too many, we'll need a constitutional amendment.

Maybe we need to question the idea that the size of a parliament should be determined by the size of the population. If you think that the main function, or one of the main functions, of a parliamentarian is to attend to the needs, wants, concerns and problems of individual constituents then, yes, the ratio of TDs to constituents matters. If you have too few TDs, then individual TDs wiill be hugely overworked while at the same time individual constituents will be inadequately served.

If you think that isn't or shouldn't be among the prime functions of a TD, then I think you have a problem, because Irish political culture and the expectations of many voters suggest that your position is a minority one. If you want a higher constituent-to-TD ratio to be a viable political proposition, then you're going to have to work on changing the culture, so that people cease to see involving their TD as the primary way of getting their administrative and governmental issues addressed.

But suppose you could wave a magic wand and change the culture. There would then be no need to have any particular ratio of TDs to constituents, so population size shouldn't determine the size of the parliament, or at least it shouldn't be the primary determinant. But if that shouldn't, what should? If parliament isn't attending to individual constituents planning applications, etc, what is it attending to? And how many members does it need to do that effectively?

One way to think about this is to look at what other countries do and, in fact, the relationship between population size and parliament size is a much-studied topic in political science. Taagapera's Law, first formulated around fifty years ago, suggests that the optimal size of the main or only house of parliament is about equal to the cube root of the population. Studies since then have suggested that this need to be refined to take account of political participation rates, literacy levels and other factors but in advanced industrialised democracies these adjustments have little impact. Taagapera's law suggests that Ireland, with a population of 5.033 million, should have about 172 TDs, so the boundary review report gets it more or less right for current conditions. But the same law suggests that, if we had a population of 6 million, we should have 182 TDs, not 200.