Leinster House is on a legislative roll. Already this year, 26 bills have been signed into law. As Gavin Reilly noted in a recent article for The Journal, this is the highest number of new laws the Oireachtas has passed before the summer recess since Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael entered coalition together in 2020.
But much of the Government’s newfound efficiency can be attributed to ruthless use of the Dáil “guillotine”. Formally called an Allocation of Time motion, it allows the Government to propose a hard deadline for a vote on the present stage of a bill. If approved by the Dáil, when that hour strikes, debate must stop immediately. Crucially, no further Opposition amendments can be moved or debated. Only outstanding Government amendments can be formally put to a vote, and then the entire bill (or stage of the bill) is put to a final vote.
Similar mechanisms exist elsewhere. At Westminster, the Government can use a “programme motion” to set a timetable for the passage of a bill, while at Stormont, the “Accelerated Passage” procedure can be used with cross-community support to pass all stages of a bill no less than ten days.
The guillotine is often used just before recess breaks, particularly towards the end of the Dáil mandate, to ensure vital legislation can be enacted without delay. However, the current Government has not waited until crunch time. Already in 2026, 14 bills have had their final debate in the Dáil cut short.
These are not insignificant pieces of legislation either. Major reforms to private rental sector regulations, the Residential Tenancies Bill, were put to a vote after just 9 of 69 amendments were debated. The International Protection Bill, described by Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan as the “most significant reform of Irish asylum laws in the history of the State”, was guillotined with only 15 of over 300 hundred amendments having had a full reading in the Dáil.
In June and July, as the summer recess deadline approached, some bills were passed at an astonishing pace. During final debate on the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill, another of the be-headed bills, Social Democrats TD Sinéad Gibney said:
“It is 11 calendar days since the text of this Bill was published. We have had four Dáil sitting days and seven working days to scrutinise this absolutely crucial Bill. Providing 11 calendar days between publishing the text and enacting the law is not parliamentary scrutiny.”
There are pros and cons to this approach to lawmaking. The Opposition are right to express concern about insufficient scrutiny of legislation. We only have to look north of the border for evidence of what can go wrong when bills are denied proper legislative scrutiny: at the end of its last Assembly mandate, the Northern Ireland Executive fast tracked a bill to provide for free parking at hospitals. The enactment of the Hospital Parking Charges Act (NI) 2022 has since been deferred twice, because there is no funding available to cover the hole it would leave in hospital budgets.
Liberal use of the guillotine also raises questions about the purpose of elected representatives, or legislators as they sometimes style themselves. If we have dispensed with the need for elected representatives to at least discuss all aspects of new laws before voting on them, then why even have a parliament at all?
On the other hand, governments all over the world are looking for ways to surmount barriers to delivery and become more responsive to the public. By accelerating legislative proceedings, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been able to lay the legal foundations for their agenda quickly. It remains to be seen whether their reforms will succeed, but at least they have been given the time to succeed, or fail.
Micheál Martin and Simon Harris have staked their electoral fortunes to the idea that this government will deliver tangible progress on the big picture challenges facing the Irish state, like housing and infrastructure. The guillotine has allowed them to try to tackle these issues with enough time for them to bear fruit by the next election. Only then will we find out if heads will roll.