Talk:Government of the 32nd Dáil

Who is Minister of/for Defence?

The Irish Sun (not normally seen as a reliable source, especially when it contradicts RTE) says it's Paul Kehoe, while RTE says Kehoe "remains in his role as Minister of State in Defence" but says nothing about who is Minister of Defence. I assume that this is all some oversight and that Varadkar is the Minister, as Kenny was. But it would be nice to have a reliable source that says this, and seemingly none does (the Govenment's own website has not yet been updated and still says it's Kenny). What should our article say? Tlhslobus (talk) 21:33, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

OK, the Department of the Taoiseach have updated their website making clear that Varadkar is the Minister for Defence (and, incidentally, once again proving the unreliability of The Irish Sun). I've now cited this, as a Citation Needed had been placed beside Minister for Defence.Tlhslobus (talk) 01:58, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Proposed merger of Ministers of States into this page

A selection of equivalent pages for other states show they have junior ministers listed on the same page as senior or cabinet ministers: e.g. Johnson ministry, Second Philippe government, Third Rutte cabinet, Fourth Merkel cabinet. While WP:OTHER isn't itself an argument, it suggests that similar editors have found this a useful way of organising lists of ministers. I'd propose listing Ministers of State in a sub-heading, on this page, and going back to the equivalent from the 3rd Dáil onward. It would have the following benefits:

• Ease of navigation: readers could see at a glance who the full list of ministers are, just as they're listed on the government's own page for this or in reference books like Nealon's, without having to click between different pages.
• Coalition divisions clearer: again, easier to see at a glance what arrangements there were between parties as to the breakdown of cabinet and junior ministers, and also between departments (e.g., James Reilly in Health, but with a Labour junior)
• extent of promotions at reshuffles would be clearer if the junior ranks were also listed.

To anticipate a few possible objections to this:

• the work involved: going back to Parliamentary Secretaries of the 3rd Dáil, it would be 30 page mergers and 30 redirects. A bit of work yes, but not the biggest maintenance or restructuring.
• WP:LENGTH: Even for the current Dáil, which includes two governments, it wouldn't be as long as the extensive list at, say, Johnson ministry. And certainly in the earlier years, adding the information at Parliamentary Secretaries of the 3rd Dáil and similar earlier governments would add very little text overall.
• The legal distinction: Ministers of the Government are approved by the Dáil and have a constitutional basis, where Ministers of State are appointed by the Taoiseach and have a legislative basis. True, but this distinction can be explained in a one-liner in the introduction to the list of junior ministers.

Do let me know what you each think! —Iveagh Gardens (talk) 10:26, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Why do you hate Ministers of State so? You seem to be on a one-person mission to delete/merge/redirect them out of existence. Previously you tried to merge the main MoS article out of existence, and now you seem intent on doing the same for each historic page.

• • Ease of navigation is a poor argument, just follow the relevant link, no reason Wikipedia should use the Irish Goverments website as its template.
  • I see no advantage to having to all on one page, just makes for a very long, unwieldy, hard to follow/read page.
  • Also, as you have already stated, Cabinet ministers are constitutional officers, where as MoS are appointed by the Taoiseach on a legislative basis, so there is a clear distinction, so they shouldn't all be lumped into one article.

I strongly oppose this proposal. Spleodrach (talk) 17:59, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

I can assure you this is not a vendetta based on an occasion a junior minister wronged me! If anything, I'd argue my proposal gives greater due prominence to ministers of state, displaying them on the same page as the cabinet ministers. If our fellow editors for other countries can do so in a way that is not unwieldy or unclear, I don't think it is beyond our capability to do so either. We're probably not going to get anywhere going back and forth between ourselves on this, I'd be interested to hear the views of other editors on Irish political pages like Jnestorius or BrownHairedGirl. —Iveagh Gardens (talk) 09:06, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, @Iveagh Gardens.

I looked at this and took a while to think it over. My thoughts are:

1. Page size isn't an issue either way. The existing pages are clearly big enough to stand alone, but they are also not too big to merge if we wanted to.
2. The choice comes down to the benefits of:
3. A/ Spleodrach's preference: preserving the clarity of distinction between ten constitutionally-defined govt and the legislatively-defined juniors
4. B/ IG's preference: displaying the political map of the govt as a whole, by combining them on one page.

I mulled this over in the course of the day, and concluded that there are v good arguments in favour of both options.

There are also v good arguments against both option.

Given the political dramas on that mad island to the east of us, where the "constitution" seems to be a matter of whatever-the-people-in-power-wanna-do-today, I would hate to obscure the fact that Ireland has some constitutional hard lines here. I think we owe it our readers to keep the distinction clear, and leave them to make their own minds up about the relative merits.

So I reckon the answer is abandon the either/or approach, and choose a both/and solution which would meet everybody's objectives above. We can achieve that by keeping all existing pages, and adding a new page for the combined lists. I suggest a title: "Ministers and Departments of the nth Dáil". This could be laid out v differently to existing pages, e.g. by using bigger blocks of party colour to provide a much clearer visual map of the political balance.

That means that for each nth Dáil, we would have a set of 5 article. Examples for the 32nd Dáil:

• Members of the 32nd Dáil
• Government of the 32nd Dáil
• Ministers of State of the 32nd Dáil
• Ministers and Departments of the 32nd Dáil
• Members of the 25th Seanad

How does that sound? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:39, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. Spleodrach (talk) 12:15, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Some points, since I was pinged:

• I don't see any advantage in adding an extra Ministers and Departments of the 32nd Dáil page; it amounts to Wikipedia:CONTENTFORKING. Duplication of information is to be avoided; it adds to maintenance and things get out of sync.
• Is there a mock-up somewhere of what the merged page would look like? Or are we discussing a pig in a poke?
• "we owe it our readers to keep the distinction clear" — I would think having separate lists is enough of a distinction, without resorting to separate pages. Or we could always add a sentence to the article explaining the difference.
• What about splitting 30th Government of Ireland and 31st Government of Ireland into separate pages?
• Neither Government of the 32nd Dáil nor Ministers of State of the 32nd Dáil currently looks very nice or has much information. There is nothing about what the government has done (or failed to do) for the last three years. "Ministers are listed by seniority" is {{not in source}} and unclear: seniority of Department or length of minister's cabinet experience? The "Nomination of Taoiseach vote" sections are a lot of screen real estate with a small amount of information. "Changes in accordance with shared ministry deal between Kevin Boxer Moran and Seán Canney" — I think we owe it to readers to explain this "shared ministry deal" rather than leaving them to extrapolate from this fragment. The relevant information isn't even in 2016 Irish government formation at the moment.
• In summary: as long as the two articles are just tables, the question of one article vs two is of minor importance. If the article ever becomes a proper encyclopedia article with prose about the government as a whole and what it does, then the question becomes more relevant, and I expect it will make more sense to have a single article for all ministers.

jnestorius^(talk) 07:19, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Thank you to you all for your feedback. I'd overall find myself inclined towards jnestorius's perspectives on this, and would like to see these articles moving in the direction of the two sections on Government of the 26th Dáil, and perhaps even more so, with prose sections on each. I think with prose sections add to the case for a single page with the ministers and junior ministers of each government, as there will be some measure of duplication between them, e.g. in the case of reshuffles, or division between parties.

I do support splitting 30th Government of Ireland and 31st Government of Ireland. This was something I'd previously proposed at Talk:Government of the 31st Dáil#Requested move 28 July 2018, similarly something I'd noticed was the case for equivalent pages on other countries. Now, each state is different, and we're not bound by the precedent of our fellow editors, but they can be informative. If we're to add prose text, the case for separate articles for each government increases. It also means we'd have what is more of a Wikipedia standard of a single infobox at the top-right of the pages.

I do fully understand the importance of constitutional and legislative distinctions. One of the edits I like to make to articles is to specify the constitutional or legal basis for something. But I do think separate lists, i.e. not merging them into a single table as at Third Rutte cabinet, and sentences before each table making the basis clear, e.g. "the ministers of government were approved by the Dáil in accordance with Article 28", "the Ministers of State were appointed by the government in accordance with the Ministers and Secretaries Acts". While they have different legal bases, the ministers of state are specifically subordinate to a particular government, for example, if there's a change of government within a Dáil, the ministers of state lose office at this time. So again, I think having them on the same page reflects this, as long as it's made quite clear in the text.

I don't have time just now to create a mock-up, but can do so later this week, and can ping you again perhaps when I do so.

I do appreciate BrownHairedGirl's comments, but I again share jnestorius's concern about duplication and the risks of divergence and inconsistent maintenance of the pages. I'd probably prefer the status quo than creating a whole new set of pages with duplicated material.

I do certainly appreciate the work involved in this, and perhaps the related proposals. I also appreciate my contributions to the project can be more sporadic than that of others here, though I tend to have more time during the summer months, so I could commit to implementing most of the edits required here. But I also think Wikipedia, and sections of it, should be open to more than just piecemeal change, that like different editions of an encyclopedia or almanac, the editors might find alternative ways to organise the information. —Iveagh Gardens (talk) 09:33, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

@Spleodrach, BrownHairedGirl, and Jnestorius: I've now created two models of integrating Ministers of State into the Government pages:

• User:Iveagh Gardens/sandbox/Government of the 32nd Dáil — Using the current model, of including both governments on the same page where there is a change of Taoiseach
• User:Iveagh Gardens/sandbox/31st Government of Ireland — Using my preferred model, of a separate page for each new government with a new Taoiseach, as alluded to by jnestorius.

Within these, I made a few editorial and design choices, such as how ministers in attendance at cabinet are noted. I'd certainly welcome any discussion on these, my proposals are only starting points on potential mergers.—Iveagh Gardens (talk) 10:06, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

While discussion and consideration of this continues, I've been amending the references on these pages. This is necessary because the Department of Taoiseach website no longer gives lists of ministers which Wikipedia had been relying on. I also think links to Dáil debates are more solid references in any case that a list compiled, even if by the government itself. While doing so, two more reasons to support merging parliamentary secretaries or ministers of states into their respective government pages came to me:

• Both Government of the 31st Dáil and Government of the 32nd Dáil list Ministers of State attending cabinet in a separate table, just below the list of full cabinet ministers. If our reason for keeping them on separate pages is the legal distinction between the government ministers appointed under the constitution after approval by the Dáil, and ministers of state appointed by SI by the government under the Ministers and Secretaries Acts, then even those attending cabinet should not be on the Government pages. But it does make sense to list them, clearly the distinction between the different classes of minister quite clear. And if they can be listed, what good reason is there not to list them all, again making the distinction quite clear.
• Some of these pages have a narrative section, e.g. Government of the 13th Dáil, Government of the 24th Dáil, Government of the 25th Dáil or Government of the 26th Dáil, to greater or lesser extents. As jnestorius alluded to, this is something we should work towards in all such pages where possible, so that they're not simply dry lists. Adding Ministers of State adds relevant information to the narrative section. For example, in Government of the 31st Dáil, it's as relevant to a narrative section that Creighton or Shortall resigned for particular reasons as that there was a cabinet reshuffle or that Shatter resigned. So again, including Ministers of State, clearly distinguished as such, provides a fuller picture of the politics of a given particular government, and avoids unnecessarily directing the reader to a separate page. —Iveagh Gardens (talk) 12:17, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

No update for months, therefore no consensus for this proposal. Spleodrach (talk) 12:57, 22 December 2019 (UTC)