GAVAN REILLY: Nobody comes out clean in dirty war over Dáil voting
One of the problems with being an inhabitant of the Leinster House bubble is that you become accustomed to behaviour which is otherwise genuinely crazy. I still remember the first time I sat in the Dáil press gallery and noticed TDs voting without actually being in their seats. As a recent outsider it was baffling and somewhat alarming, until the rationale became obvious. A particular TD might have voted away from their seat… but only because they were sitting elsewhere in the chamber. They had casually managed to get the attention of someone sitting beside their own ‘true’, assigned seat, and asked them to press the button on their behalf.
It felt innately unsettling to watch this happen – that it was somehow creating a proxy voting system where none is constitutionally allowed – but like any unsettling experience, it’s easier to go through the more you see it. And in time you become blasé about it; it’s the norm that TDs vote by actually getting someone else to press the button for them.
The argument might be that this is fairly harmless – and perhaps it is. Sometimes a TD can spend a week or two trying to get the ear of a minister on a particular issue; the one time they know the minister will be present is during a vote. They might plant themselves on the aisle beside that minister’s seat, or in the row in front of them, or even in the seat next door. That TD is in the chamber, and entitled to vote, but returning to their seat means missing out on the minister’s attention. And so they ask a neighbour to press the vote for them – sure what harm? – or they simply approach the aisle and, instead of disturbing colleagues like latecomers in a cinema, just borrow a thumb. Suddenly an aberration becomes the norm: a Newstalk survey yesterday revealed that nearly half of all TDs have either voted on behalf of, or had their vote cast by, a Dáil colleague.
But thus a new culture is established, where it’s okay to lend your thumb to someone else, and in this ‘new normal’ certain other offences begin to look much less outrageous. And this is how we develop a culture where Niall Collins thinks it acceptable to vote for Timmy Dooley six times, without even the due diligence of turning around to check if his colleague was still in the room and thus entitled to borrow Collins’ thumb for voting purposes. It is also why some like Lisa Chambers, who accidentally votes on behalf of a colleague by sitting in the wrong seat, feels no compulsion to approach the tellers and make known her error.
Sloppy attitudes breed sloppy practices. While an original edition of casual practice might have been acceptable – if it doesn’t change the outcome of a vote – how are we now to have confidence in any other close vote? Back in 2017 the Government needed the casting vote of the Ceann Comhairle to save it from defeat on an ‘anti-evictions bill’. How are we now to know for sure that, in the future when a vote passes by the bare minimum, that everyone who ‘voted’ was entitled to actually do so?
There are any number of possible changes to come now. A proxy voting system is probably a non-runner because the Constitution requires decisions to be made by those who are “present and voting”. But might there be a higher form of identity? A thumbprint needed, perhaps, to activate the voting buttons? Could an ID card be issued, which needs to be inserted into the buttons? The European Parliament operates a system like this, where MEPs often cast dozens of votes inside a ten-minute period – but the Oireachtas ruled it out, on the premise that a TD or Senator might easily lose their card.
Perhaps, in a reactionary but well-intended move, electronic voting would be ditched altogether. But that’s hardly a forward step either: the eight votes conducted last Thursday, in now controversial circumstances, took about an hour to do. Holding those votes by the old-fashioned ‘walk through’ – where TDs literally file past two volunteer tellers, and are counted as they do so – would take three hours. That’s a big cumulative waste of time over the course of a full Dáil term.
The offending TDs who cast votes for invisible colleagues are not the only ones with questions to answer though. Where are the whips? How could a party whip not realise when a TD, who was expected to be absent, has actually shown up on the voting register? How would they not get annoyed when a TD is supposed to be present for voting, but fails to show? And what about the tellers, who would be crucified if they handed in a wrongful list of voters during a walk-through vote: why are they permitted to sign the record of a vote without even looking around to check that all the ‘voting’ TDs were actually inside the room?
The whole ‘vote-gate’ furore is so scandalous precisely because so many different levels of public authority have been shown wanting. The Ceann Comhairle and tellers are apparently happen to idly sign the results of a vote without even a pinch of scrutiny. Some party whips seem to pay no heed to the names on the sheet, or care whether the absentee member has actually shown up or not. (I dare say when she was chief whip of this minority government, Regina Doherty had to pay much closer attention to the whereabouts of her precious voters.) And ultimately we have members themselves, who set the ball rolling on the sloppy upkeep of Dáil voting records by deciding once upon a time that it was okay to press the button on behalf of a colleague who showed up to the chamber but decided there were better places to be, than in the physical seat that their voters gave them