DUBLIN — Ireland’s parliament suffered a nervous breakdown Tuesday when the government forced through new speaking rules that the opposition refuses to accept.
Led by the nationalist Sinn Féin, opposition parties heckled and shouted every time Prime Minister Micheál Martin tried to answer a question or the speaker, Verona Murphy, tried to impose order.
After a two-month deadlock over speaking rights, the government had hoped the confrontation would end Tuesday. It forced through an amendment to existing rules that creates new twice-weekly slots for pro-government independent lawmakers to ask questions of Martin.
But soon after that amendment was passed, Martin was shouted down as he attempted to answer his first question. As scores of opposition lawmakers stood and refused to stop shouting, Murphy conceded defeat and shut parliament for the day.
It marked the second time she was forced to take that step following January’s first failed attempt to elect Martin as Taoiseach, Ireland’s “chief.”
Murphy wasn’t even able to announce the official outcome of Tuesday’s vote, she said, because opposition lawmakers refused to sign the document confirming the number of votes cast on their side. Moments earlier, video screens inside the Leinster House parliament building showed the government had won in a 94-74 verdict.
A visibly angry Murphy at one point accused opposition lawmakers of treating her, the first female speaker of Ireland’s parliament, with “misogyny.”
“Deputies, while you may not have respect for me, I am the chair. When I speak, nobody else speaks,” she said during one of several failed attempts to get Sinn Féin politicians to sit down and shut up.
Collapse in consensus
The collapse in cross-party consensus on the rules governing Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s parliament, has made it impossible to establish cross-party committees that scrutinize government bills.
The standoff reflects opposition hostility to the make-up of Martin’s coalition government: a centrist combo of his Fianna Fáil party and Foreign Minister Simon Harris’ Fine Gael supported by a small, right-wing group of non-party politicians styling themselves the Regional Independents.
The key architect of the Regional Independents is Tipperary lawmaker Michael Lowry, a one-time Fine Gael heavyweight who in 2011 was found by a fact-finding tribunal to have engaged in shady deals with some of Ireland’s top business figures.
In exchange for securing their pro-government votes, the Regional Independents won a lot: the speaker’s chair for Murphy, junior ministerial posts with Cabinet access — and, most controversially, parliamentary speaking rights normally earmarked for opposition lawmakers.
The opposition insists Lowry, in particular, cannot be allowed to participate during their twice-weekly opportunities to question Martin. The amendment passed Tuesday sought to overcome that complaint by creating a new time slot for questions from “other members.”
In between interruptions, Martin argued that Sinn Féin and other opposition leaders were deliberately making a mountain out of a molehill in a bid to sabotage the functioning of parliament. He said the tactic was particularly reckless given Ireland — the EU’s biggest per-capita exporter of goods, particularly pharmaceuticals, to the United States — may be about to take an oversized hit from U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to impose hefty tariffs on that trade.
But Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said normal business wouldn’t resume unless Martin agreed to rules that firmly place the Regional Independents on the government side of the house.
“The combined opposition are not backing down on this matter. We reject your attempt to run roughshod over this Dáil and to ram through this motion,” she told Martin. “What you will not get away with is pretending that signed and sealed government TDs can act as opposition. You cannot be in government and opposition at the same time.”
The only pro-government lawmaker who seemed to enjoy Tuesday’s abortive debate was Lowry, who didn’t speak but frequently waved to opposition chiefs — among other gestures — as they criticized him.
Lowry offered a particularly broad smile when Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik, a constitutional law expert, dismissed Tuesday’s motion creating a slot called Other Members’ Questions. “This device,” she said, “is really being introduced to give the Lowry lads special time to tell the government how well you’re doing. You know it. Everyone in the country knows it.”
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