Nor are these the imaginings of theory. They are the practical outcome in every country or state where the Referendum and Initiative have been adopted. They have especially been the result in Switzerland, where, by means of the Initiative, the people have insisted on measures being passed that no political party would have dared to undertake. For there are many questions that cut clean across all parties, which dare not offend a majority or a minority, and where therefore the unity of the party comes before the interest of the nation. But minorities from all parties may join, and in Switzerland have joined, together to press for their adoption, with the consequence that the National Assembly has had no alternative but to frame legislation to deal with them. And when such legislation has come before the people by the Referendum, the people have in many cases adopted them.
The presence, therefore, in our Constitution of both the Referendum and the Initiative is therefore a sign that the people of Ireland are to be rulers in their own house--not merely as against foreign control, but as against the dominance of political parties. It means more. It means that responsibility is now definitely reposed in them. There are provisions which, in the present draft of the Constitution, could with advantage be changed. For to require, in Article 43, that a petition from the people of not less than "one-twentieth of the voters then on the register" is necessary (in the alternative of a vote of three-fifths of the Senate), before a measure may be put to the Referendum, is to impose an almost impracticable, and certainly an extremely difficult, task. It reveals a fear of the exercise of the Referendum that experience in other countries does not justify. With the wide franchise allowed in the Constitution, the tendency will be to play into the hands of political parties, and one of the purposes of the Referendum is to destroy the power of political parties. Yet a slight change here may easily be made. And the essential fact is that the people of Ireland, having asserted the fact of their sovereignty, and defined its qualities, proceed to exercise its functions by holding over the Oireachtas the two instruments of the Referendum and the Initiative.