Gavan Reilly: The proof is in... This is the least productive Dáil in history

Well, it’s official. I’ve crunched the numbers and can now tell you for certain: this is the least productive Dáil in history.

That’s not a subjective call. A lot about politics is subjective: the merit of a budget, the significance of a speech, the consequence of a ministerial decision. There are no metrics on how to measure those, and any barometer is only as good as the person designing it.

But on the raw numbers? This isn’t working.

When Leinster House goes on its Christmas holidays this Thursday, the Oireachtas will have passed a grand total of 20 new laws – the lowest number in over a century.

There’s only one calendar year where Ireland’s professional legislators produced fewer laws, and that’s 1922, in which the Free State only existed for three weeks. Even still, five laws got passed in that fortnight before Christmas. Even in 1982, when the Dáil was dissolved twice, TDs still got 29 laws written and passed.

This December will result in a grand total of seven Bills being sent to Áras an Úachtaráin to be signed into law before Christmas. Some of those are relatively rudimentary, and will get through the Dáil and Seanad with only a couple of hours of token ‘debate’.

There are some circumstances that put this into context. The government was only formed in January, and only one of the 15 Cabinet-grade ministers was retained in their old jobs. Moreover, the row over technical groups and speaking time for the pro-independent TDs meant it was Easter before most of the Oireachtas committees could be formed, which in turn delays the line-by-line examination of proposed new laws.

But the delay is scarcely forgivable when the new government is mostly a discontinuation of the old one: replace the Green Party with a handful of independent junior ministers and you could say the government was re-elected.

That should mean the ‘new’ government picks up where the last one left off, and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

And that’s a point worth reasserting, given the government likes to portray itself as having to rebuild its internal systems from a standing start. This is not a new government, but a coalition reformed and re-elected pretty comfortably, with a programme for government that only took a couple of weeks of meaningful negotiations to put together.

What’s more, the outgoing ministers left a conveyor belt of initiatives in the works when they handed over. Where is the evidence of those leads being picked up? If anything, there has been a conscious effort to drop some of them: remember Helen McEntee’s plans to liberalise pub licensing laws? There are only two valid interpretations of the dismal hit rate. One is that the Green Party were way more influential than they were able to tell us, and that it’s taking ministers ages to figure out which ‘Green’ bits of the agenda to dump. The other is that, because so many jobs passing between the two big parties, neither of them instinctively trusts the agenda left by the other. Either way, something’s not working. And now we have figures to prove it.