Irish Parliamentarians Research Articles

Parliamentarians and the covid-19 pandemic: insights from an executive-dominated, constituency-oriented legislature

ABSTRACT Because parliaments are the cornerstone of representative democracy, we know a significant amount about how they operate in ordinary times. Covid-19 presented extraordinary challenges to the functioning and operation of national parliaments. This article explores the impact of Covid-19 on parliament from the point of view of its members. We report results from a survey of Irish parliamentarians, exploring members’ perceptions of their engagement in law-making, government oversight, and constituency representation. The results suggest an interesting paradox: Parliamentarians felt less able to perform their legislative and oversight functions but – with the aid of new technologies – felt better able to perform their representative and constituency roles. The wider implication is that Covid-19 intensified existing patterns of executive legislative relation: in the Irish case at least, the (electoral) incentives to undertake constituency work motivated continued constituency service, while the weakness of parliamentary oversight of the executive intensified.

Irish Parliamentarians: Deputies and Senators 1918 - 2018 by Anthony White (review)

the use of ‘worship’in the ‘real world’, but he speaks, with Jesus of the ‘hope of that life of that world which is almost here…Such hope is awoken in the sermon, nourished in Eucharist, and expressed in service to neighbour and stranger. Such hope cannot but praise’ (p.172). There is a final afterword which brings the whole book together and points its relevance to the current Irish situation: ‘worship is what we do in God’s time’ (p.175). And here lies the solution to what we have done and are doing to our planet. One important element of worship is, for the author, that ancient discipline of lament: ‘Lament is born of the humility that comes from encounter with the insistent Lord’. And perhaps we can do no better than conclude this review with a heartfelt plea that this book should be widely read, and with its final sentence: ‘In worship, the Son of God will give us courage to reject the false master Mammon and show us how to faithfully follow the only true Lord, Jesus’ (p.181). This is a book decidedly for our time. Fr Nicholas King SJ is Tutor and Fellow in New Testament Studies in Campion Hall, Oxford. Irish Parliamentarians: Deputies and Senators 1918 – 2018, Anthony White (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2018), 600 pages. The current Decade of Centenaries programme has been a cause of much thought and reflection on the birth of the Irish Republic (formerly the Irish Free State) and the survival of its democracy over the decades since. It is an opportune time to reflect on the founders of the state and those politicians who set up the machinery of government in those early and very difficult years, as well as those who followed in their footsteps. Thus, the publication ofAnthonyWhite’s directory, Irish Parliamentarians: Deputies and Senators 1918–2018, of the 1,870 men and women who have served as members of the Houses of the Oireachtas in the parliament of the Irish state since the first meeting of Dáil Eireann on 21 January 1919 is most timely and welcome. The 1918 General Election was a direct contest between the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had dominated Irish politics for the previous forty years, and the new Sinn Féin party, which had won just six by-elections in the previous eighteen months. Thanks largely to the single-seat constituencies Studies • volume 108 • number 430 225 Summer 2019: Book Reviews then in being, Sinn Féin won seventy-three seats with forty-six point nine per cent of the vote, while the Irish Parliamentary Party won just six seats with twenty-one point seven per cent of the vote. (Five of the six were in Northern Ireland). Anthony White profiles all of these first-time deputies, including such figures as Constance Markievicz, Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha and Richard Mulcahy. Constance Markievicz (née Gore-Booth) was, of course, the first woman ever elected to Westminster, even though she did not take her seat. She was also the first Irish cabinet minister, serving in the Department of Labour from April 1919–January 1922, and chaired the inaugural meeting of Fianna Fáil in 1926. It was to take another sixty years before the second woman, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, was appointed as Minister for the Gaeltacht by Taoiseach Charles Haughey in 1979. However, since 1981 there have been eighten female cabinet members and thirteen female ministers of state. Six women were members of the Second Dáil (1921–22) and this was not surpassed until 1977. The number of women TDs reached double figures in 1981, exceeded twenty in 1992 and passed thirty at the 2016 General Election, when thirty-five were elected. One woman and one man, who served as senators, Douglas Hyde and Mary Robinson, were elected President, while five men who served as Dáil deputies were elected to the Áras: Séan T O’Kelly, Eamon de Valera, Erskine Childers, Patrick Hillery and Michael D Higgins. In the First Dáil, Anthony White notes that Richard Mulcahy (later leader of Fine Gael and government minister) won the highest number of first preference votes...

Synthesis and Large-Scale Textual Corpora: A Nested Topic Model of Britain's Debates over Landed Property in the Nineteenth Century

Scholars need tools that will allow them to generalize about the fit of themes, events, and rhetorical styles represented in a body of texts. In this article, we introduce the concept of “nested topics,” an approach to topic modeling large-scale textual corpora that highlights implicit ontologies and relationships within the texts themselves. This tool exploits the fact that topic modeling can be used to generalize about topics on an aggregate level as well as a fine-grained level, an approach that has the consequences of revealing overarching themes that appear across all texts as well as more idosyncratic events and rehtorical styles that adhere to only a few documents. The tool’s effectiveness is tested by modeling discussions of property in British parliamentary debates in the nineteenth century. Nested topics help the authors to locate the rhetorical styles engaged in by Irish parliamentarians as they defended tenant rights in the 1880s.

How Have Irish Parliamentarians Adapted to the Age of Web 2.0?

This article explores the engagement of members of the Irish lower parliamentary chamber (TDs) with Web 2.0 technologies. While conducting the website-feature analysis, the authors looked at three dimensions of each TD's website: information content, interaction tools and politicians' activities on the web. They found that Irish parliamentarians' usage of the Internet is still largely based on the paradigm of Web 1.0. Perhaps more accurately, Irish politicians' Internet usage is in the mode of Web 1.5, in which some interactive and participatory space is generated with the idea that the cyberspace should encourage citizen participation. As conventional variables such as party affiliation and geographic variation still have an influence on TDs' website performance, one can conclude that information and communication technologies do not really change the way Irish politics are played. The Irish experience is in line with various other studies, such as in Italy and Finland.

Hibernian Sans-Culottes? Dublin’s Artisans and Radical Politics 1790-1798

In Ireland during the 1790s, middle-class radicals and republicans were denigrated by conservatives as Irish ‘Jacobins’. Simultaneously, Irish urban workers (tradesmen, journeymen and apprentices) came to be seen as a potentially dangerous force which resembled – not the bourgeois Jacobins – but the Parisian Sans-culottes. Despite very significant differences between Dublin and Paris, the workers in each city shared certain features, such as a strong egalitarian ethos and a highly literate culture of remonstrance and protest. While Dublin, unlike Paris, was not the site of a successful revolution, it too contained a vibrant radical underworld in which urban workers voiced their political aspirations. This article examines some of the factors that contributed to Dublin’s network of artisan clubs, such as municipal politics, a lively print trade, the ethos of the city guilds, and the interactions between Irish Parliamentarians and the urban ‘mob’. It then examines how Dublin’s artisan radical clubs interacted with, and were eventually incorporated into, the middle-class United Irish Societies. It finally suggests that Dublin’s artisans represent an intriguing case of how revolutionary doctrines were received in Ireland at the popular level.

How parties win: shaping the Irish political arena

In recent decades, Ireland's three major political parties have maintained over 80 percent of the vote in the face of rapidly shifting social divisions, political values, and controversial issues, though not by giving voice to particular interest groups or reacting to issues of the day. Rather, Sean D. McGraw reveals how party leaders select, or purposefully sideline, pressing political and social issues in order to preserve their competitive advantage. By relegating divisive issues to extraparliamentary institutions, such as referenda or national wage bargaining systems, major parties mitigate the effects of changing environments and undermine the appeal of minor parties. This richly textured case study of the major parties in the Republic of Ireland engages the broader comparative argument that political parties actively shape which choices are available to the electorate and - just as importantly - which are not. Additionally, McGraw sets a new standard for mixed-method research by employing public opinion surveys, party manifestos, content analysis of media coverage, the author's own survey of nearly two-thirds of Irish parliamentarians in both 2010 and 2012, and personal interviews conducted over the course of six years.

Ideological Flexibility and Electoral Success: An Analysis of Irish Party Competition

This article argues that Ireland's major party elites enjoy an unusual degree of ideological flexibility, which in turn provides the parties with an uncommon capacity to adjust programmatically when changing electoral opportunities, or challenges, present themselves. Evidence from two originally designed parliamentary surveys, conducted in sharply different contexts in the 2007 and 2011 elections, supports this finding. A closer examination of individual TDs’ policy positions reveals that TDs possess considerable flexibility to adapt their policy appeals. Although parties may appear programmatically similar at the aggregate level, the high degree of internal ideological heterogeneity reinforces that the autonomy individual TDs have to alter their positions within their local electoral context. These findings point to a conclusion that the presence of a high degree of ideological flexibility, especially at the level of individual TDs, not policy positions in themselves, is critical for understanding electoral politics in Ireland. This conclusion stands in contrast to the popular perspective that competition over policy may alter the nature of party competition in Ireland. The findings also provide a deeper appreciation of how Irish parliamentarians are able to assume policy positions among their constituents that often differ from the party line in legislative votes in parliament.

Is All Politics Local? The Role-orientation of Irish Parliamentarians towards Foreign Policy

Whereas numerous recent studies have explored the structural and procedural ability of national parliaments to provide oversight of transnational issues such as European integration, the nature of individual parliamentarians' interest in foreign policy is a subject that has received little attention. The general assumption is that electoral incentives and informational deficiencies dissuade parliamentarians from actively engaging politics beyond the domestic realm. This paper suggests an analysis of parliamentary questions as a method for measuring individual parliamentarians' interests in foreign policy. Applying this technique to the Dáil uncovers evidence that, contrary to theory-derived conventional expectations, some parliamentarians do seek to monitor the government's foreign policy agenda. While conventional explanations of legislative role-orientation only weakly predict variations in observed behaviour, elite interviews identify lobbying by interest groups and foreign governments as the motivation for some Irish parliamentarians' engagement in foreign affairs.

“A means of restoring the health and preserving the lives of His Majesty’s subjects”: Ireland’s 18th-Century National Hospital System

In 1765, the Irish parliament enacted legislation that established a nationwide hospital network funded by a mixture of taxation and philanthropic donations. The county infirmaries had a similar ethos to the British and Irish voluntary hospitals; only those with an admission ticket were admitted. The legislation also regulated the qualifications of the County Infirmary Surgeons who were authorised to run the infirmaries. This was the first statutory nationwide network of care in Ireland. No other country in contemporary Europe passed similar legislation. The Irish parliamentarians and Charles Lucas in particular appear to have been the impetus for this innovative legislation.

Using Parliamentary Questions to Measure Constituency Focus: An Application to the Irish Case

Individual legislators differ in the degree to which they work to cultivate personal votes. While conventional wisdom declares that the electoral system typically motivates the choice of legislative role, researchers have found difficulty assessing empirically the role behaviour of legislators. This study suggests using the content analysis of parliamentary questions as a mechanism to measure variations in personal vote-earning strategies. To demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, and the constituency focus of Irish parliamentarians, 123,762 questions tabled by Dáil Deputies between 1997 and 2002 are analysed. While evidence of some orientation toward localism is apparent, the data suggest significant variations in role orientation among legislators. Competing electoral system and non-electoral system explanations of intra-system variation in personal vote-earning effort are hypothesised and tested. Characteristics such as district magnitude, intra-party competition, electoral vulnerability, geography, education, gender and career incentives only partially explain the variation. The results highlight the need to move beyond using electoral rules as a general proxy for role orientation and behaviour.

MODERATE NATIONALISM AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION, 1916–1923

This article reconstructs the constitutionalist nationalist critique of the Irish revolution. It employs the writings of Stephen Gwynn, John Dillon, Jasper Tully, and others to illustrate the views of those Irish parliamentarians who were marginalized by the emergence of Sinn Fein as the dominant force in Irish political life after 1918. Stephen Gwynn, in particular, claimed that republican violence could not militate against – indeed exacerbated – the damage done by the failure of the constitutionalist nationalists to grasp the need for compromise over Ulster. Indeed, Gwynn argued that the violence of the Collins era – which has been justified on counter intelligence and broader political grounds – played a major role in shaping the sectarian institutions of the Northern Irish state. Gwynn's reflections on the self-defeating aspects of the Collins strategy are linked to a wider consideration of the role of the British government. This article attempts to qualify a scholarly orthodoxy – that British policy in 1920–2, undoubtedly subject to fluctuations, was incoherent and essentially reactive; instead, it argues that from the spring of 1920, Britain evolved a strategy, dependent on a considerable degree of intelligence success, involving the application of a carrot and stick policy designed to lead precisely to the Treaty compromise of 1921, but available much earlier to any Sinn Fein leadership willing to take it.

Bourne, Norfolk and the Irish Parliamentarians: Roman Catholics and the Education Bill of 1906

When Francis, Cardinal Bourne died on New Years Day, 1935, his friend and erstwhile collaborator in successive national congresses, George Anstruther, assistant editor of The Tablet, a paper owned by the archdiocese, referred to Bourne's ‘greatness’ as being unlike that of a waterfall but more akin to a quiet river ‘broad and deep, bearing precious freights to safe havens’. The image was supported in a broadcast of Viscount FitzAlan about the deceased prelate in which he stressed that Bourne possessed a ‘rather cold and calm reserve’ concealing ‘a profound spirituality’. The editor of the Jesuit magazine The Month postulated ‘prudent ecclesiastical statesmanship’ had marked a long term of office of over thirty years and Bourne's regular correspondent, Archbishop Alban Goodier, testified to his having been ‘among the shyest of men, so shy, that to many he remained always hidden in his shell’. Indeed, rarely has a man's memory been tarnished so effectively by his friends, all with the most uplifting of motives. The secular press was less mealy-mouthed. The Times considered Bourne to have been ‘a statesmanlike champion of religious education’ and ‘a courageous opponent of all those modern movements and influences which are calculated, openly or swiftly, to sap the foundations of family life and, indeed, the whole structure of the community’.