The Government has sent out Mr. Batt O’Keefe TD, Minister for Education etc. to explain what the Government has decided to do about the criminal organisations named in the Ryan report.

Having heard him, one is reminded of what Antoine de Saint-Exupery said of his like;

Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.”

Irish society is suffering from serious failures on the executive side.

The Law Reform Commission, by contrast, is an Irish institution that is functioning well.

I have referred HERE to its proposal that Ireland implement a system for accommodating “class actions”.

An executive failure (whether in the executive proper or in the administration of the Courts) is all the less forgivable when a good workable proposal is advanced by the Commission and then ignored.

Undoubtedly the failure to have such a system caused considerable loss to the State in the “Army Deafness” cases.

The continuation of that failure is not, therefore, simply a hard-nosed conservative attitude of denial to personal injury claims (which it is), it is a fundamental failure of imagination, and ultimately, of management.

I do not intend to imply that class actions will arise solely in relation to personal injury claims. They will appear there; the pollution of the Galway drinking water supply is a case in point. With a system for making multi-party claims, the injured people of Galway would undoubtedly have made claims for those injuries. They could have done so individually; the fact that they appear not to have done so is some evidence that Ireland is not a litigious society.

Class actions will arise in consumer law cases. It would be wrong, to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, to conclude that “the business of Ireland is business” and, as a non-sequitur, conclude that the interests of business are paramount over those of the Irish consumer.

There is no excuse for a grown adult to contemplate going to Dail Eireann during family day, or worse still, going there.

To do so is to play the fool.

The Dail is firmly under the thumb of the Government, whereas our Constitution envisages that it should be the reverse. The principal purpose of a Constitution is to rein in the Executive. Representative democracy exists for the same purpose.

To be offered a tour of the Dail building when the functions of the Dail have been fully drained away, in substance, is to be treated like a fool. To take it is to endorse the situation, to clothe a scandal with validity.

No effort is afoot to change this situation of loss of power and function by Dail Eireann.

Not only does the Dail have little real control over the Bills and Acts passing through and emerging from the legislative process, it has next to no control over secondary legislation (Statutory Instruments) implementing the Acts. As the Ombudsman noted;

A particular area of concern is the huge amount of secondary legislation arising directly at national level or as a result of European Union membership. Most of this legislation is not subject to any parliamentary scrutiny and can give rise to the so-called democratic deficit. The Ombudsman could perhaps be of service to the Oireachtas in drawing attention to the not infrequent instances where delegated legislation seems to go further than intended by the primary legislation. In this context, I have noted the recommendation of the Constitution Review Group that consideration should be given to an amendment to Article 15.2.1 of the Constitution so that the Oireachtas should have the power to authorise by law the delegation of power to either the Government or a Minister to legislate using the mechanism of a statutory instrument. I have suggested to the All Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution that the Ombudsman should be granted specific powers in cases where delegated legislation could have an adverse effect.”

What the Ombudsman was warning against is that law was being made in “not infrequent instances�?, which had not emanated from the Dail at all.

No one should go to the Family days; to do so is to be complicit in their own humiliation.