How Ireland governs itself and why every change needs a vote

What the constitution is and who owns it

Bunreacht na hÉireann was enacted by the people on 1 July 1937 and came into operation that December, replacing the constitution of the Irish Free State. The distinction between enactment by a parliament and enactment by a vote matters here more than in most countries, because the same rule governs every change to it since.

Article 46 sets out the only route. An amendment must begin in Dáil Éireann as a bill, must pass both houses, and must then be put to the people in a referendum. A constitutional amendment bill must be expressed as an act to amend the constitution, and it may contain no other proposal, which prevents a change being carried on the back of an unrelated one.

The constitution is therefore altered in public and in the open. Twenty-two amendments have been carried since 1937 and the list reads as a record of the country's arguments with itself: the voting age lowered to eighteen in 1972, an article on the rights of children in 2012, a court of appeal created in 2013, marriage equality in 2015, the regulation of termination of pregnancy in 2018, the removal of blasphemy from the text later the same year, and changes to divorce in 2019. Two proposals were rejected, including one in 2013 to abolish the upper house.

How the Dáil is elected

Members of Dáil Éireann are elected on the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote. Voters rank candidates in order of preference, surpluses above the quota transfer down, and the lowest candidates are eliminated with their votes redistributed until every seat is filled.

Two constitutional rules shape the outcome more than the counting method does. No constituency may return fewer than three members, which sets a floor on how proportional the result can be. And the ratio of members to population must be as nearly the same across the country as is practicable, with the constituencies revised at least once every twelve years to keep it so, though any revision takes effect only after the sitting Dáil ends.

The practical effect is a chamber in which single-party majorities are rare and coalition is the normal condition, and in which members are elected in competition with running mates from their own party as much as with opponents. That produces representatives with an unusually local orientation, since a deputy's seat depends on being preferred to a colleague by the same voters.

What the Seanad is and what it can do

Seanad Éireann has sixty members. Eleven are nominated by the Taoiseach after the Dáil reassembles following a dissolution. Six are elected by graduates, three by the National University of Ireland and three by the University of Dublin. The remaining forty-three are elected from vocational panels representing fields such as culture and education, agriculture, labour, industry and commerce, and public administration, on a franchise consisting mainly of elected representatives.

The Seanad revises and delays. It cannot block. That distinction was built in deliberately after the experience of the Free State's upper house, and it means the chamber's influence depends on the quality of its scrutiny rather than on any threat it can carry. A bill the Seanad does not pass can be deemed passed after a stated period of ninety days, provided the Dáil resolves to that effect within a hundred and eighty days of it expiring. On money bills it may only make recommendations, which the Dáil is free to ignore, so the budget is settled entirely in the lower house, and a government with a Dáil majority therefore never needs the Seanad's agreement to raise or spend money.

The chamber's own existence was put to the people in 2013 and survived. The campaign to abolish it argued that a body elected by graduates of two universities and by panels of councillors and parliamentarians cannot claim a democratic mandate, and the campaign to keep it argued that removing the only revising chamber would leave a single house with no check on it at all. The proposal to abolish it was defeated, which left the country with an upper house that most of its critics still regard as unrepresentative and that the electorate declined to remove.

Where the president fits

The presidency is directly elected by secret ballot for seven years, and the office is deliberately weak. Executive power belongs to the government, which the constitution makes responsible to Dáil Éireann. The head of government is the Taoiseach, appointed by the president on the nomination of the Dáil, and the other ministers are appointed on the Taoiseach's nomination with the Dáil's prior approval. The government must have at least seven and no more than fifteen members.

What the presidency does hold is a set of reserve powers, most of which require consultation with the Council of State, an advisory body of office-holders and former office-holders. The most consequential is under Article 26: the president may refer a bill to the Supreme Court to decide whether it is repugnant to the constitution, within seven days of the bill being presented for signature. That puts constitutional review before promulgation into the hands of a directly elected head of state rather than a litigant.

Article 27 adds a rarer mechanism. A majority of senators together with at least a third of the Dáil may petition the president to decline to sign a bill on the ground that it contains a proposal of such national importance that the will of the people ought to be ascertained. The president may also convene either house, and may refuse a dissolution to a Taoiseach who has lost the confidence of the Dáil.

What the two official languages require

Article 8 makes Irish the national language and the first official language, and recognises English as a second official language. It also allows the law to provide for the exclusive use of either language for particular official purposes, throughout the state or in any part of it, which is the constitutional basis for the special status of Gaeltacht areas.

The ordering is not decorative. Where the enrolled Irish and English texts of the constitution conflict, the text in the national language prevails, and the same rule applies to any law enrolled in both languages. A court reading the constitution in a hard case is reading the Irish.

That creates an obligation with an awkward relationship to how the country actually speaks. Every act must be capable of being produced in Irish, the courts must be able to operate in it, and public bodies must be able to deal with the public in it, in a state where 40.4% of people said at the 2022 census that they could speak Irish and 71,968 said they used it daily outside the education system. The drafters wrote that gap into the text deliberately, giving the language a legal position stronger than its everyday one precisely because the everyday one was already weak in 1937. Every subsequent language act has worked from that constitutional footing. Ireland: culture takes up the policy that followed.

Who decides whether a law stands

The Oireachtas holds the sole and exclusive power of making laws for the state, and any law repugnant to the constitution is invalid to the extent of the repugnancy. That makes judicial review the ordinary mechanism of Irish constitutional politics rather than an exceptional one.

The court structure has four tiers: District Court, Circuit Court, High Court and Supreme Court, with a Court of Appeal inserted between the last two by the thirty-third amendment in 2013 because the Supreme Court's backlog had become unmanageable. Adding a court required a referendum, which is a fair illustration of how much of Irish institutional design sits inside the constitutional text rather than in ordinary legislation.

A reference under Article 26 is decided by the Supreme Court sitting with at least five judges, and a bill upheld on such a reference can never afterwards be challenged, which is why presidents use the power sparingly. Ordinary constitutional challenges begin in the High Court and can run to the Supreme Court in the usual way, and they have decided some of the largest questions in modern Irish life.

Where power sits below the state

Ireland is a unitary state with weak local government by European standards, and the constitution says so only briefly. Article 28A, inserted by the twentieth amendment in 1999, recognises the role of local government as a forum for democratic representation and requires local elections at least every five years. Before that amendment, a government could and did postpone them.

The present system rests on the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 and its successors, most recently the Local Government Act 2001 as amended in 2014, which reduced the structure to thirty-one local authorities: twenty-six county councils, two city and county councils, and three city councils. The twenty-six traditional counties are the basis of the map, with Cork, Dublin and Galway each divided into more than one authority.

What those authorities do is narrower than their counterparts elsewhere. Planning, local roads, sanitation and libraries are the substance; health, education, policing and social welfare are run centrally. The counties are grouped into three regions with assemblies made up of delegates from the councils, and those regions plan rather than administer.

The counties matter for a reason beyond administration. Dáil constituency boundaries are drawn so as to avoid breaching county lines as far as practicable, so the county is simultaneously a local authority area, an electoral frame and, through the games played under its name, the strongest unit of ordinary Irish identity below the state.

How the country relates to its neighbours

Ireland joined the United Nations on 14 December 1955 and the European Communities on 1 January 1973, on the same day as the United Kingdom, and it adopted the euro. Membership of the European Union has required several constitutional amendments, because ratifying a treaty that transfers competence needs the people's consent, and Irish referendums on European treaties have twice returned a rejection before a second vote reversed it.

The country is not a member of any military alliance and maintains a policy of military neutrality, while participating in United Nations peacekeeping. That position is a matter of policy and practice rather than a constitutional prohibition, and it is argued about continuously.

The United Kingdom is the state's only land neighbour, and the border runs through a settlement rather than around one. The settlement of 1998 that ended three decades of violence in Northern Ireland rests on agreement between two governments and both communities, and it is woven into the constitution: the territorial claim to the whole island was replaced by an aspiration to unity achieved only with the consent of majorities in both jurisdictions. Ireland: history sets out how that came about and Ireland: economy what the border now means in practice.