Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently floated holding a referendum to amend the Constitution to increase the number of members of government. Article 28 provides as follows: “The Government shall consist of not less than seven and not more than fifteen members who shall be appointed by the President in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution.”
As somebody with some experience of referendum campaigns, I think such a proposal would be defeated if put to the people and in the unlikely event it passed, seriously weaken our constitutional order.
The cabinet is a collective authority and is required to meet and act as such. The executive power of the Irish State is exercised by or on the authority of this collective authority. The government is “responsible to Dáil Éireann” and is “collectively responsible” for departments of State administered by its members.
When I served as attorney general, minister and latterly as tánaiste, I had opportunities to observe growing divergences between the realities of cabinet government in the UK and Ireland.
I remember, in particular, a conversation with one of Tony Blair’s attorneys general in which we compared and contrasted the role of the cabinet in the two jurisdictions. He was surprised when I told him the Irish attorney general attended cabinet, which met weekly. He asked me to describe how Government business was transacted through cabinet. I told him that every decision was taken by the entire cabinet and almost always on the basis of a memorandum circulated in advance to each member of the government, so that it could be discussed at the weekly meeting. All members were entitled to be heard on the matter under discussion and to circulate their written observations on memoranda submitted for decision.
My interlocutor expressed considerable surprise at this model of cabinet practice. He indicated regular weekly meetings of the entire cabinet were not the rule in London and that cabinet discussion and approval of all governmental decisions was not the norm in the UK.
I gathered from him that Downing Street was far more dominant in the UK machinery of government than the taoiseach’s department is in Ireland. Senior advisers in Downing Street under Blair were, with the possible exception of the chancellor of the exchequer, more important and more authoritative than individual cabinet members.
In the UK, there are 22 cabinet ministers including the lord chancellor. The attorney general for England and Wales is not usually in attendance by reason of a view that the “independence and detachment of his office should not be blurred by his inclusion in a political body”.
In Ireland, by contrast, the attorney general holds office at the pleasure of the taoiseach and is notified of all proposals to be made to government and has an opportunity to advise on their legal and constitutional implications. The Irish attorney general is accorded, by custom, the right to comment on legal and constitutional matters at cabinet with the permission of the taoiseach.
Of course, my periods in office coincided with Tony Blair’s New Labour governments and with inter-party coalitions in Ireland. Coalition government is fundamentally different from single party government in that governmental decisions cannot be effectively made in advance by an internal party process.
The sad decline of collective cabinet decision-making and its replacement in the UK by a more presidential role for the prime minister and his or her advisers has accelerated since the 1970s. As portrayed in the brilliant TV series, The Thick of it, the role of figures portrayed by the foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker has increased. Unelected personalities such as Dominic Cummings have no direct equivalent in Irish politics.
The danger of expanding the size of the cabinet in Ireland lies in the unwieldiness of having perhaps between 20 and 25 people present at cabinet meetings. Securing full attendance becomes more difficult. The temptation to abandon regular weekly meetings with a full circulation of memoranda collectively increases the more unwieldy cabinet becomes. Inner or kitchen cabinets become dominant. Maintaining collective input, confidentiality and cohesion becomes more difficult.
The current distribution of portfolios is not written in stone. Do we really need multiple senior finance and education ministers, or separate culture and rural affairs ministers? I would argue that we do need a full-time senior minister for defence to rescue Ireland’s capacity for its own internal and external security from the pitiful neglect of the last 20 years.
More telling than inherent systemic dangers of simultaneously expanding and weakening cabinet as a constitutional organ is the simple fact that a referendum to expand the cabinet would be highly unpopular. The “fewer politicians” rhetoric of the failed attempt to abolish the Seanad would be turned back on a political elite perceived as pursuing “jobs for the boys”. The kite flown by the Taoiseach seems more like a lead balloon.