Gavan Reilly
In Politics by Numbers, broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week.
THE VOTE IN the end was unremarkable. By 79 votes to 71, the Dáil approved the second reading of the Defence (Amendment) Bill – and to vote, substantively, for the first time to remove the ‘triple lock’ rule on the deployment of the Defence Forces.
The prior debate ran for about 3.5 hours; opposition TDs demanded more, but didn’t get it. The ‘guillotine’, an artificial time limit on the time available for debate, was pushed through at the Government’s behest on Tuesday. This method has come back into fashion of late; when Fianna Fáíl supported a Fine Gael government from the outside, it was all but abandoned, and has crept back into usage with a majority government looking to enforce its way.
The usual defence for using the guillotine is that a bill is time-sensitive and needs urgent passage. Whether that’s true in the case of the triple lock is a matter of debate. The pre-legislative scrutiny of the bill was concluded in the summer of 2025, but the government took 11 months to then publish its final draft – and another four months to bring it into the Dáil for formal voting. If the government urgently wanted this done, critics would argue, it had plenty of time to do so.
But those on the government side have counterpoints of their own. Whatever about the delay in getting the bill to this point, time is now of the essence: Ireland is sending 294 members of its Defence Forces to Lebanon next month, in what will be the final battalion of peacekeepers in the United Nations mission. The triple lock requires deployments overseas to have an international mandate, but the United States has used its veto at the UN Security Council to pull the plug on the mission with effect from 31 December. There are suggestions of a successor force, with a different flavour of international backing, taking up residence thereafter. Your columnist understands that some within the Defence Forces would like a loosening of the deployment criteria to have taken effect by then.
That’s one reason why governments might use the ‘guillotine’ to expedite a final vote. Another reason has been touted within opposition circles in the last few days: the notion that speaking time was deliberately limited so that the coalition’s own backbenchers couldn’t have some.
The thinking goes: when debate is confined to a single block of time, the government’s share of speaking time is used exclusively by ministers, with the main sponsor of the bill usually opening and closing the discussion. If debate had expanded any further, the government’s share of time would then have opened up to its own backbenchers – not all of whom would have much to say in support of the government bill. Fourteen of Fianna Fáil’s backbench TDs (and three senators) signed a letter in June raising explicit concern about the moves.
The whip
Different opposition whips I canvassed for opinion put different weight on this theory. One said it was “100%” the likelihood that the government had curtailed speaking time simply to deny a forum for its own internal critics. Others put the odds at closer to zero, given that the bill now has to undergo line-by-line scrutiny at an Oireachtas Committee where the limitations on speaking time are far looser and angry backbenchers have full scope to vent their spleens. (That committee is chaired by a Sinn Féin TD, who might well offer latitude to these critics to weigh in, even if they’re not formal members of that committee.)
Other whips from the opposition benches are simply more blunt in their belief about why this bill has been guillotined: the bill is simply an unpopular one, and the government wants to get it passed with as minimal publicity and fuss as it can manage. If that were the goal, the timing might well look like what we’ve actually seen: an idea floated so long ago that the eventual debate on the bill seems unremarkable, and a bill quickly shoved through its first debate with minimal extra fuss.
In any event, governments are well versed in the chicanery of using procedural tools to avoid obstacles from within and without, and the management of parliamentary affairs is exactly what whips are trained to do. But if the rationale is to limit the scope for backbenchers to speak out, it would mark the quiet abandonment of the crusade that led the government into such bother last year.
It’s easy to forget now, given how things have since bedded in, just how fraught the formation of the current Dáil was. It’s only 19 months since the row over the formation of technical groups, and the assignment of speaking rights, triggered an unprecedented vote on whether to sack the Ceann Comhairle.
The germ of that whole row was the attempt of some independent TDs to form a grouping for Dáil purposes, which would grant them an unprecedented advantage of sharing in opposition speaking time while effectively serving as backbenchers in government. The rules had never imagined a world where an independent TD would be a backbencher, and left the authorities trying to figure out whether the likes of Michael Lowry and Danny Healy-Rae should be considered government or opposition. The resulting fudge was to treat them as neither.
The government weaved its way through that unholy row with the contention that Dáil speaking time is unfairly weighted to opposition parties in the first place, and that the rules ought to be rewritten so that government supporters without ministries could get more of a say. In a failed attempt to soothe its critics, the government then lengthened the sitting day so that this extra time would not come at the expense of anyone else. For example, this is why the Dáil’s Thursday sittings now begin at the peculiarly fixed time of 8:47 am.
The most visible exponent of this, however, is if you tune into Leaders’ Questions on a Wednesday or Thursday. After four opposition leaders get to speak, there’s time for one government supporter to make a similar inquiry. This was a lightning rod for the opposition’s ire last year, claiming it would allow backbenchers to cosplay as opposition leaders. However, with only two slots a week and around 32 sitting weeks a year, most TDs will only get the chance for an elongated query once a year – which they’ll naturally use to raise a constituency issue, ready for the exchange to be recited in a newsletter or posted on socials. After an original bout of ceremonial boycotts and walkouts, ‘Other Members’ Questions’ now passes unremarked.
But recall the blood spilt by the government in getting them over the line to accommodate their independent backers, and the explicit defence offered: securing more speaking time for their own TDs. How does that square with curtailing a debate on a landmark piece of legislation, and a key shift in Irish foreign policy, that – by accident or design – means its own backbenchers can’t get to speak?
In all, the sturm und drang of the new rules has abated, and the arrangements have calcified into normality. But a cynical viewer of work in Leinster House would wonder if the cover is now blown – and if the excuse given by the government to vote through such foundational changes to speaking time has finally dissolved away after 575 days.
Gavan Reilly is the political correspondent for Virgin Media News and the host of Monday with Gavan Reilly, which airs every Monday at 10pm on Virgin Media Play and Virgin Media One.