A strong executive dictating terms to a weak legislature has been a defining feature of the Oireachtas for too long. Nowhere is this dominance better exemplified than in how governments prepare the Budget and how the Oireachtas debates it. The Cabinet agrees the budget measures in secrecy. A government majority in the Dáil ensures their legislative passage. The Oireachtas is allowed little time to closely scrutinise those provisions. In addition each year, large sections of the finance bill, which implements the budget measures, are voted through without discussion.
Cabinet secrecy – Irish style – on budget matters is greatly overdone and parliamentary involvement in influencing or shaping budget decisions remains minimal. All of which is set to change following approval by the new Government of proposals to reform the budget process. A government without a natural parliamentary majority must – as the Fine Gael minority administration recognises – make a virtue of political necessity. It must allow the Dáil to examine, debate and make recommendations on budgetary priorities at each stage of the budgetary cycle. In taking this long overdue policy initiative, it is also responding to the OECD's criticisms of what, by international standards, it regarded as inadequate budget oversight by the Irish parliament.
The potential benefits of reform are clear: a public dialogue between the Government and parliament should help ensure that poorly conceived and inadequately costed policy initiatives are challenged and checked. One such blunder was the decision of the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition in the 2003 Budget to introduce a public service decentralisation programme which proved an expensive and wasteful folly. Reform of Dáil procedures to facilitate a dialogue between Government and Opposition is a first step. Even more critical is a necessary change in political culture. Above all that will require Opposition parties and Independents, in particular, to accept that with greater influence in shaping policy decisions on budgetary matters comes greater responsibility.