Be Careful What You Wish For
There’s been plenty of talk lately about ‘Cutting The Fat’ in the Dáil. It’s a line item on Fintan O’Toole’s petition. Martin Naughton’s argument that the Dáil should be 1/2 the size gets a front page article in the Irish Times.
Aside from the symbolic cost saving from downsizing the Dáil what effects would a smaller Dáil have? Would the composition be changed significantly?
Consider the results of the 2007 election. Those candidates elected to the first and second seats wouldn’t have been affected but if we can tally up which parties took the final seat in each constituency we can get a good sense of how the overall composition would be changed by decreasing the total number of TDs.
If we took one seat off each constituency the Dáil would be 26% smaller. However, the impact would fall disproportionately across the parties. Sinn Féin would have lost 75% of its seats. Independents -60%, Green Party -50%, FG -27%, FF -21%, LAB -20%. The 2 PDs wouldn’t have been affected but 2007 was an exceptional year for the PDs.
Perhaps even more interesting is the list of individuals who wouldn’t have been elected. In a 2007 Dáil with one TD fewer per constituency there’d have been no John Gormley, Ciaran Cuffe, Beverly Flynn, Jackie Healy Ray, Finian McGrath or Joan Burton.
Another outcome is that FF would have had 50% of the seats in the Dáil: Enough to form a majority Government with no Green Party, Independents or PDs.
In an actual reduction of Dáil members the decrease in seats would be distributed more equally among constituencies. However, these figures do show that smaller parties tend to get elected to the marginal seats.
Based on this, it looks as though a smaller Dáil would concentrate power in the big parties at the expense of the smaller ones. It will be interesting to see how this analysis applies to the next election.
