Is there anywhere to see how long our TD's have spent speaking in the Dail?

FatB

As the title suggests, I'm looking to find somewhere that keeps track of how much speaking out elected representatives spend in the dail. It's a little late for elections but certainly something I want to keep an eye on in the future.

Thanks.

♥

Wildlife Actor

Don't think there's a record of for how long or how many times a particular TD has spoken but, wat's probably more useful, there's a searchable database of Oireachtas debates at debates.oireachtas.ie. So you get to see just how cr@p most contributions actually are.

Having been - hopefully - a bit helpful there, can I swerve the thread by pasting a comment I just made somewhere else (which everyone ignored, as usual) and may be closer to this thread:

Maybe it's for a different thread, but isn't this whole problem of Independents being useless and having to form technical groups to achieve anything one of the strongest arguments for reducing the Dail to 50 or 60 members. I don't know the figures but it seems that an independent gets virtually no airtime ("Dail privileges") whatsoever. Meanwhile the backbenchers in the majority don't need the airtime as they're whipped into their position. If we had 50 or 60 TDs there would be fewer independents but at least, those that were there would have a worthwhile opportunity to contribute.

Hank_Jones

They spend feck all time speaking there unless they have to, simple as.
And in the case of the FF government, there was always someone standing in for someone else, basically a lower ranking member reading from a page...

Politics, isn't it grand...