In Politics by Numbers, broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week.     

THE VOTE IN the end was unremarkable. By 79 votes to 71, the Dáil approved the second reading of the Defence (Amendment) Bill – and to vote, substantively, for the first time to remove the ‘triple lock’ rule on the deployment of the Defence Forces.

The prior debate ran for about 3.5 hours; opposition TDs demanded more, but didn’t get it. The ‘guillotine’, an artificial time limit on the time available for debate, was pushed through at the Government’s behest on Tuesday. This method has come back into fashion of late; when Fianna Fáíl supported a Fine Gael government from the outside, it was all but abandoned, and has crept back into usage with a majority government looking to enforce its way.

The usual defence for using the guillotine is that a bill is time-sensitive and needs urgent passage. Whether that’s true in the case of the triple lock is a matter of debate. The pre-legislative scrutiny of the bill was concluded in the summer of 2025, but the government took 11 months to then publish its final draft – and another four months to bring it into the Dáil for formal voting. If the government urgently wanted this done, critics would argue, it had plenty of time to do so.

But those on the government side have counterpoints of their own. Whatever about the delay in getting the bill to this point, time is now of the essence: Ireland is sending 294 members of its Defence Forces to Lebanon next month, in what will be the final battalion of peacekeepers in the United Nations mission. The triple lock requires deployments overseas to have an international mandate, but the United States has used its veto at the UN Security Council to pull the plug on the mission with effect from 31 December. There are........

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