In 8 A.D. the Emperor Augustus condemned the poet Ovid to live in Tomis in Moesia.

Tomis was at the edge of the Roman Empire on the Black Sea, near the mouths of the Danube, a mere 450 miles or so from a bend in the Volga where Stalingrad would later be sited.

Ovid’s trial was held in camera before the Emperor. His ostensible offence was the writing of the Ars Amatoria. Eight years had passed since its publication: the Emperor’s real motivation lay in the discovery of the wanton life of his daughter Julia and he was in search of a scapegoat.

Ovid was that scapegoat.

This truth, or context, deprived Ovid of the chance to address the Emperor’s motivation in condemning him to exile, as he wrote from Tomis to his friends and public in Rome.

In the face of power, formally judicial or otherwise, it is necessary to be circumspect.

As Ovid discovered, and told his Roman readers, the Danube and even the Black Sea would freeze over in winter. He expressed his anguish in the recollection of his last moments in Rome;

Iamque quiescebant voces hominumque canumque,
Lunaque nocturnos alta regebat equos.

At last all noise of men and dogs was still,
The moon was driving high o’er heaven’s hill.”

His life in Tomis is recalled and examined in “An Imaginary Life” by David Malouf. Malouf’s book, a sustained work of imagination, is a reflection on what it is to be human. Ovid’s humanity, in the loneliness of his exile, is counterpointed by the strange example of a feral boy found by the inhabitants of Tomis and brought in from the barbarous wastes of the steppe.

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.