The formulas (and chincanery) behind setting up the Dáil's new committees
There's a news scoop buried in here, which I'm sharing because you're lovely.
A common refrain during the impasse over speaking rights was that the Dáil needed to get on with things and form its various Committees, which are the real workhorse for getting work done in Leinster House.
In truth, while both Government and opposition blamed each other the delay setting up committees, the delay was a natural consequence of the row on speaking rights. What was publicly referred to as the ‘speaking rights row’ was technically a row over the rules on the formation of technical groups. (Even that sentence is enough to instil tedium, which is why the ‘speaking rights’ label was more commonly used.)
To put it plainly, you can’t start the process of forming Oireachtas Committees until you’ve got clarity on which groups exist, and how they are to be treated. If the rules had not been changed - and if the Ceann Comhairle had allowed them to do so - the Regional Independent Group, simultaneously in government and opposition, would have had to be factored into the sums. Only the conclusion of the speaking rights row, and the changing of Dáil rules to allow pro-government TDs form an “others” group, means the path is clear to move forward.
There’s a few different legs to the process of setting up committees, but some of the main ones will kick off this week. Today (Wednesday) the Committee on Dáil Reform will meet to agree exactly what committees will be set up, and the process through which each grouping in the Dáil gets its chairs. Tomorrow (Thursday), the parties then go the motions and divvy up those chairmanships among themselves. After that, the Dáil breaks for an Easter recess, so the process of actually filling the seats won’t begin until the end of the month.
Before 2016 and the advent of ‘new politics’ - an era which seems a loooong time ago, given the changes we’ve seen pushed through in 2025 - the committee chairmanships were appointed simply by brute force. The government, presuming it had a majority in the chamber, would therefore have a majority on every committee, and would use that majority to appoint one of its own as a chair. The exception was the Public Accounts Committee: by longstanding convention, an opposition TD was allowed to chair the PAC, on the basis that no government TD should be marking the government’s homework when it comes to scrutinising State spending.
Since 2016, though - and the creation of a FG-Ind government which did not carry a Dáil majority, and needed FF’s external compliance to stay in office - the chairs have been assigned through something called the D’Hondt method.
Longtime followers of politics in the North will already be familiar with D’Hondt: it decides how many of the seats each party is entitled to claim as part of the Northern Ireland Executive. The SDLP are now in opposition in Stormont not because of a principled decision to stay out of power-sharing (although they have done their best to take principled positions in doing so) - it’s because they didn’t win enough seats in the Assembly to qualify for one of the 10 Seats in the Northern Ireland Executive.
There’s a couple of ways you can explain D’Hondt but I find the simplest one is this: take the number of seats that each party won in the election, and divide them by 2, and by 3, and by 4, and by 5… Lay all those results out on a table, and the highest number gets first dibs, the second-highest number gets second dibs, the third-highest number gets third dibs, and so on.
Before showing you the sums, three things to know:
The government is proposing to set up 28 committees. I’ll throw a full list at the bottom of this article for anyone interested.
The ‘parties in government’ is treated as a single bloc under Dáil rules; Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael together have 86 TDs. This highlights one failing of the rules as they stand: even though there are five independent TDs actually in government, holding ministerial roles, their number is overlooked because of the present wording.
The ‘others’ - Michael Lowry and co - do not factor into these sums. Their ‘other members’ grouping is overlooked, at least for the purposes of divvying out the chairs of committees. (An interesting side note, and something which we’ll find out soon, is whether Lowry & Co will be allowed to take some of the committee seats which nominally belong to the government ‘parties’.)
With that explained, here’s the sums. Sorry the graphics are a little lo-fi; longtime X followers will know I’m a Google Sheets guy:
Hopefully this table makes sense to follow: you can think of the number of seats for each party as its ‘score’, and every time that score results in that party taking a chairmanship, the score is reduced.
The outcome of this is:
The Government will hold 16 chairmanships (getting picks 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25 and 28) - and by convention will not choose the PAC
Sinn Féin will take 7 (picks 3, 6, 9, 14, 19, 23 and 26)
Labour will hold 2 (picks 11 and 27)
The Social Democrats will get 1 (pick 13)
The ‘Independents & Parties’ technical group (PBP, Greens, 100% Redress, plus Seamus Healy, Catherine Connolly and Brian Stanley) get one (pick 17)
The ‘Independent Group’ (featuring Independent Ireland, Aontú and Paul Gogarty) get one (pick 21).
Here’s where the chicanery kicks in…
Seeing the sums laid out like this really illustrates the dent taken by the Social Democrats when they suspended Eoin Hayes from their group. The outcome of Election 2024 should have meant the Social Democrats would be ranked as the second-biggest party in opposition, after Sinn Féin: even though they had the same number of seats as Labour, they would gain priority in the chamber by virtue of having won more first preference votes in the election (4.81% versus 4.65%). The loss of Hayes - suspended after he admitted misleading the party, and journalists, about the timing of his disposal of shares in Israeli military supplier Palantir - reduced the headline figure to 10 TDs and saw Labour retain its status of seniority.
Moreover, when it comes to carving up the chairs of Oireachtas Committees - the consequence is stark. Labour’s 11 TDs means that when D’Hondt runs its course, the party is entitled to appoint two committee chairpersons. Those are roles which not only command a certain level of public attention, but also a €10,888 annual allowance.
Had the Social Democrats remained a group of 11, they too would have been entitled to two chairs - and will now have to make do with one.
Or will they? This newsletter can reveal that despite his ongoing suspension from the parliamentary party, Eoin Hayes has written to the Clerk of the Dáil asking that he be considered a Social Democrats TD for the purposes of assigning committee chairs among parties.
As I understand it, this is not a move which has been engineered by the party - and it may be the case that Hayes has become aware of the consequences for his party, simply as a result of my reporting on it yesterday. but comes about, I understand, after parties were made aware of how the D’Hondt process would work out.
Ahead of the D’Hondt procedure being run this afternoon, the Social Democrats are also arguing the case that Hayes remains a member of their parliamentary party, merely with the whip temporarily removed.
“There has been no change since the election of November 2024 in the number of Social Democrat TDs elected to the Dáil,” Cian O’Callaghan wrote, in an email sent to the Clerk and then circulated to other parties. “There were 11 Social Democrat TDs elected to this Dáil and, notwithstanding internal disciplinary measures, there remain 11 Social Democrat TDs in our party.”
Update, 4:44pm: My attention has also been drawn to a report by the Business Committee in February, from when ‘normal’ Dáil business was getting underway, in which O’Callaghan made similar arguments and dissented from Labour being ahead of his party on speaking rights.
If they were to make this claim successfully, the sums would work out a little bit differently:
Restoring Hayes to the Social Democrats’ ranks would mean the party gets a second committee chairmanship - though at the expense of the Government, not of Labour, who still retain their second chair. However, Labour might still feel slighted, as their picks will be comparatively further down the list as would otherwise be the case.
As news of this begins to percolate around Leinster House, two observations have been made: firstly, after repeatedly quipping that Michael Lowry and company “can’t be in government and opposition at the same time”, the SocDems are effectively claiming that Eoin Hayes is simultaneously inside and outside the fold, like some kind of Schrödinger's Deputy.
The second question is… is the Leader of the Social Democrats actually a TD yet?
Arguably, not. Usually in the days after a general election, TDs rush to Leinster House to sign the members’ roll book - not just for a nice photo, but because that’s how they start getting paid. TDs are entitled to their pay from the date of the election, but are generally not considered to have taken up their seats until they sign the roll book.
And, through no fault of her own, Holly Cairns hasn’t done this yet. The 35-year-old became a mother on November 29, the same day she was re-elected to her seat for Cork South West. As there is no formal means for TDs to take maternity leave, Cairns has simply been informally absent for the time ever since, and hasn’t yet made the journey up from Skibbereen to Leinster House to sign the members’ book.
She hasn’t been assigned a seat for the Dáil’s electronic votes, but has had a few dozen parliamentary questions submitted in her name - possibly by staff working in her office - while she’s spending time with her four-month-old daughter.
Long story short, however, her status as a full TD does not appear to be cut and dried - and some have therefore wondered if the SocDems should be considered as a group of 9 (minus Cairns and Hayes), rather than a grouping of 10 or 11 for D’Hondt purposes.
If they end up treated as a group of nine, the overall outcome would still be as it is in the current situation - Labour getting two chairs, and the SocDems getting one, albeit with the latter having to make do with the 15th pick.
I wrote in last week’s Sunday Independent about how the seeds of a genuine alternative government have been sewn in the last few weeks - if only the parties involved want to stay on good terms for the next few years. The prospect of Labour picking fights with the Social Democrats, over their order of precedence in choosing committee chairs, is an acid test of it.
There’s a subscribe button below - and feel free to press it if you like this sort of thing - but I’d be even more delighted if you’d consider pre-ordering my book, The Secret Life of Leinster House, which is released on May 22. You can pre-order it from Eason’s, Dubray, Kenny’s, Bookstation, TheBookshop.ie, Waterstones/Hodges Figgis and Amazon.
Appendix: The new Dáil committees
Standing Committees
Committee on Members’ Interests of Dáil Éireann
Committee on the Irish Language, Gaeltacht and the Irish-speaking Community
Committee on Public Petitions and the Ombudsman
Committee on Public Accounts
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Departmental Select Committees
Agriculture and Food
Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport
Children and Equality
Disability Matters
Climate, Environment and Energy
Defence and National Security
Education and Youth
Fisheries and Maritime Affairs
Further & Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science
Enterprise, Tourism and Employment
Finance, Public Expenditure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, and Taoiseach
Foreign Affairs and Trade
Health
Housing, Local Government and Heritage
Justice, Home Affairs and Migration
Social Protection, Community and Rural Development
Transport
Thematic Committees
Committee on European Affairs
Committee on Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement
Committee on Key Issues affecting the Traveller Community
Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery
Special Committees
Committee on Drugs Use
Committee on Artificial Intelligence
Fantastic analysis
Hi Gavin didn’t maternity leave for members pass in Oct? Has it not been commenced?