Every election since 2007 has produced fresh pledges on political accountability. Registers of interest. Codes of conduct. Ethics commissions. Lobbying regulations. Whistleblower protections. Each arrived, each was welcomed, each was quietly absorbed, none bit hard enough to be felt. This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of proposing reforms one at a time to a political class that is professionally organised to absorb them one at a time.

A single accountability reform can always be dulled. It can be scoped narrower in committee. Its penalties can be reduced to the civil sphere. Its enforcement body can be underfunded. Its trigger thresholds can be raised. Most commonly, it is simply passed in a form its authors recognise as diluted, but which they defend publicly because the alternative is no reform at all. The register of interests is on every TD's desk. The penalty for failing to maintain it is a letter.

A programme is harder to dull, because dulling any one piece exposes the gap it was meant to fill. Remove the personal liability from the Politicians' Code and the Code becomes advisory. Remove the term limit from the Taoiseach amendment and the amendment becomes ornamental. Remove the independence of the electoral oversight body and the reforms above it stop landing because the referee is captured. Each piece presupposes the others. A programme is a structural proposition; a single reform is absorbable.

I have submitted two motions to the Longford–Westmeath branch of the Social Democrats today — 18 April 2026 — as the opening beats of a named programme. The programme is deliberately named here, in public, so that its future beats are visible before they are submitted, and no single piece can be quietly adopted as a substitute for the whole.

The named beats

1. The Politicians' Code. Submitted 18 April. A separate legal jurisdiction for elected office, modelled on military law, signed before nomination papers can be filed. Lying to the Dáil, undisclosed conflicts, corrupt influence and their siblings become triable in a Public Office Tribunal, with personal asset exposure, pension forfeiture and lifetime disqualification on serious breach. Addresses behaviour in office. Detailed proposal here.

2. Two Terms. Submitted 18 April. A constitutional two-term lifetime ceiling on the office of Taoiseach, mirroring the amendment the Hungarian electorate passed into their Fundamental Law on 12 April 2026. Grandfather clause treats all current and past holders uniformly, two further terms from enactment, so no individual is removed from office by the amendment. Addresses tenure at the top. Detailed proposal here.

3. Executive and Legislative Term Limits. To follow. Extends the tenure principle below the Taoiseach: limits on Ministerial and Junior Ministerial tenure, limits on consecutive Dáil terms for the same constituency. Different constitutional tracks: some amendable by legislation, some requiring further referendum. Addresses accumulation of position.

4. Electoral Commission Entrenchment. To follow. An Coimisiún Toghcháin has existed as a statutorily independent body since February 2023, but its independence rests on ordinary legislation that a future Oireachtas majority can amend or repeal. Constitutional amendment to place its appointment process, funding, commissioners' terms of office and core functions beyond the reach of ordinary legislation, so the Commission cannot be weakened by any future government without a referendum. Addresses durability of oversight.

5. Revolving-Door Closure. To follow. Statutory cooling-off periods for Ministers, senior advisers and regulators before they may take employment, directorships or paid speaking roles in industries they regulated. Enforcement against the individual, not the hiring firm. Addresses deferred corruption.

Further beats will be named as they are drafted. They will be published before they are submitted. This is deliberate. A programme published before its parts are submitted cannot be defused by absorption of one part.

The structural logic

Each beat addresses a distinct failure mode:

  • Behaviour in office: individuals lying, taking money, using position for private gain. Addressed by the Code.
  • Tenure at the top: individuals accumulating power over time by staying in one role indefinitely. Addressed by Two Terms.
  • Accumulation of position: individuals moving between offices to remain in power in different chairs. Addressed by the Executive and Legislative limits.
  • Capture of the referee: bodies that oversee political conduct becoming answerable to the political class they oversee. Addressed by Independent Electoral Oversight.
  • Deferred corruption: decisions made in office that are rewarded by employment after office. Addressed by Revolving-Door Closure.

A reform addressing any single one of these without the others is not wrong. It is incomplete in a way that lets the failure modes it does not address continue untouched. The five together make a floor, not a ceiling. The ceiling is what politics builds on top of the floor.

The test that matters

Any elected official, of any party, will be asked, in some form, to respond to this programme. The useful question to put to them is not "do you support accountability?". Every politician supports accountability in the abstract. The useful question is "which of the five named beats do you oppose, and why?"

A politician who cannot name a beat they oppose is a politician who has no reason not to support the whole programme. A politician who names one beat they oppose has given you their actual position, which is almost always more informative than their manifesto. A politician who claims to support the principle but has specific objections to the drafting has given you a negotiation partner.

This is the question every Social Democrats branch, every active citizen, every journalist and every researcher should put to every candidate at the next election. Not "do you support reform?" but "which of these do you oppose?". The answers will sort the political class into three categories very quickly.

The short version

Twenty years of individual reforms produced an accountability framework that does not bite. A programme of five structural reforms, named publicly before submission, builds the floor that individual reforms failed to. I have named it. The remaining question is whether other parties will name what they oppose, what they support and what they would add.

Which is, in a democracy, the only useful question.

Overwatch Report is an independent publication. We have no financial positions in any entity mentioned.

Related: when these motions were actually submitted to a branch, this is what happened. Corruption in Miniature.