Accessing Dáil Debates

Records of Dáil debates corresponding to each of the policy documents specifically, and also generally to the policy area, are another important genre chain element of the research sample. Irish parliamentary business follows the Westminster system for the “purposes of overseeing and questioning government work” (MacCartaigh, 2005, p. 98), this involves “debate during the various stages of the legislative process; various forms of parliamentary questions; and deliberation over motions and resolutions” (ibid.). These Dáil debates are archived on the Oireachtas website http://historical- debates.oireachtas.ie/48 which has archived all the Dáil debates since 21 January 1919 until 10 July 2009. On the historical debates website, there is a chronological list of all the debates by date which can be browsed. Following a number of fruitless trials using the search facility this browsing method was utilised; it was quite a time consuming

47 _{http://www.irishtimes.com/archive/}

48 _{There is now a newer website hosting archived Oireachtas debates; it is updated daily and also houses} the historical debates, at: http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/. For the purposes of amassing the corpus for this sample, the older website was mostly used because the data collection was undertaken before the newer website came online. The search facility on the newer website is less efficient than the historical website, it allows similar filtering of results, but it does not inform the user as to how many results it has retrieved and only displays 10 results at a time as opposed to 25 at a time on the older site.

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process. Browsing by date entailed clicking on each date listed per month for the 1998- 2008 time period; this seems rather excessive but given the manner in which the information is archived, it seemed like the most logical way to attempt to ensure that all relevant debates were included in the corpus. Within a day’s debate listings, the page is organised into two halves, the top half of the page includes the oral debates, which consist of any legislation or bills which require debate followed by “priority questions”, “other questions” and then any other resumed or adjourned debates which are ongoing. The lower half of the page is a record of the written answers; see Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1: Screenshot of Dáil debates archive web page for March 4th 1998 from http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/en.toc.D.0488.19980304.html

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When the list of a day’s debate proceedings was called up on to the screen, a simple page search conducted using the web browser’s find function, in this case Mozilla Firefox, was used in order to look for links which included words from any of the following search terms: “children”, “rights”, “children’s rights”, “early childhood education”, “childcare”, “pre-school”, as well as visually scanning the page for debates named with the policy document titles.

Following retrieval of relevant debates by title, through the browsing method, the search facility was then employed as an additional measure to ensure that all relevant debates, within the time period, were retrieved. The search facility on the website is supported by a searchable database, which can be somewhat hindered by the way the information is classified and organised within the database. Hence it is useful to utilise the combined use of both browsing and searching to ensure retrieval of all necessary results. A search of this database necessitates using a combination of search terms in one of two separate fields in order to yield the results. There is a field to search debates by words or phrases included in the title and another to search words or phrases included in the full text of debates; the search engine can also be limited by houses of the Oireachtas, that is the Dáil or Seanad, it can be limited by house business, separating debates and question time, then it can also be limited by date and by speaker. However the additional limits can negatively affect the retrieval of results so it appears to be safer to just limit the retrieval of results to Dáil only and then use either of the separate search boxes. The results must then be sorted through, literally by clicking on each one and verifying the pertinence of the actual text of the debate; there can generally be quite a large amount of results so this can be a long and arduous process. For example, in order to find debates around the White Paper it was necessary to use a combination of a number of different search terms; these were entered into the search field by surrounding them in single

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quotation marks, which is the operator for phrase searching within that database. The phrase searches which were used to retrieve results pointing to relevant debates include: 'ready to learn', 'white paper on early childhood education', 'early childhood education', and 'early years education'. However, it was not enough just to search these terms in the title field, it was also necessary to search for relevant words or phrases included in the full text of debates also, so as not to eliminate a relevant debate that was named differently but actually had pertinent content. The subsequent verification of the content of these debates was necessary also to filter out irrelevant results.

Figure 5.2: Screenshot of Dáil debates archive web page search facility: http://historical- debates.oireachtas.ie/plweb-cgi/fastweb?TemplateName=search.tmpl&view=oho-view

A significant issue which was encountered throughout this data collection process was to fully comprehend and evaluate the relevance of “written answers”49 within the parliamentary debate system. Written answers are archived within the online historical Dáil debates repository. Rather than oral debates discussed openly on the floor, written

49 _{Written Questions or ‘written answers’ are described on the Department of Justice and Law Reform} website as “questions put to the Minister which are answered in a written reply on most days that the Dáil is sitting ... the questions and answers are published in the Official Report and within 24 hours on the Oireachtas website” (DJLR, 2011).

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answers appear to be addressed in writing by the appropriate government cabinet TD in response to an opposition TD. They most often tend to be related to more local constituency based issues or general questions requesting clarification on or statements about the progress of policy implementation. Such questions tend to elicit rather generic and pedestrian “written answers”. The use of written answers, and in fact the entire parliamentary questions aspect of Dáil debates has been criticised, not least by Murphy (2006), who contends that:

despite placing supposedly more penetrating demands on Ministers, an examination of the content of parliamentary questions suggests that they are used more as a means of meeting constituency demands than they are a means of engaging in true scrutiny of government activity (p. 439).

Nevertheless since these ‘written answers’ are archived on the website, this necessitated paying them some attention in order to evaluate if the material was suitable for the corpus or not. After careful evaluation of the function of written answers, it was decided to exempt them from use in this research sample. This is due to their tendency to be a mechanism which provides government TD’s with the opportunity to extol the virtues of a particular policy, or publicize developments and investments to date, rather than serving as any kind of debating tool or challenge to the development of policy. They do not appear to be a function for debate about wider conceptual issues. For example, a typical ‘written answers’ question is often phrased as such:

Mrs. B. Moynihan-Cronin asked the Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs the number of recommendations arising from the report by the Commission on the Family which have been implemented to date; and if he will make a statement on the matter (Moynihan-Cronin, 2001).

Hence for the purposes of this study, the corpus of Dáil debates includes oral debates and priority questions only50. The search results displayed tags which serve to identify if the retrieved result refers to a written answer or another type of parliamentary question,

50 _{Those which are found at the top half of the page if browsing the Oireachtas Dáil debates website by} date, as evidenced in Figure 5.1

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thus any search results that were identified as ‘written answers’ were subsequently discarded51.