Shadow Legislative Affairs Minister John Barritt is so fed up with marathon debates and rambling speeches that he has proposed changes to the rules governing parliament.

Yesterday Mr. Barritt tabled f or debate a motion on proposed amendments on the Rules "with a view to improving and modernising the operation and effectiveness'' of the House of Assembly.

On one occasion last autumn the House of Assembly met for just over 24 hours until 11 a.m. on a Saturday for the debate on Government's Constitutional changes.

Many members left the chamber to go home and rest or slept at their desks.

And with a lack of coordination on the number of speeches other debates have collapsed when few people have spoken on a topic and members have had to scramble to keep the agenda moving.

Mr. Barritt proposes changes in the timing of the parliamentary questions and the question periods in the orders of the day and time limits on both sitting length, individual debates, and member's speeches.

Also proposed is the creation of new select committees and using them to do more preliminary work outside of the House thereby saving time. "I did it and presented it to the (United Bermuda Party parliamentary) Group and they asked me to go forward and present it to the House and the public to get some reaction,'' Mr. Barritt said afterward.

"For me, this is something I feel more now in my eighth year than ever before,'' he continued, "and I thought to myself we need to improve and raise the level of debate so we can be a more disciplined body.'' Select committees he said, could "achieve a consensus'' between Government and the Opposition before a sitting so that the pace of business can be better run on Fridays.

Mr. Barritt added that representatives of the UBP and the governing Progressive Labour Party could "work together in the way in which parliamentarians should''.

When it comes to speech lengths, Mr. Barritt suggests that there could be unrestricted speech length for the minister or member responsible for a bill being discussed and his opposite number.

But other MPs would be limited to 20 minutes as they are in the Motion to Adjourn where they are "accustomed to the discipline required to state their case in 20 minutes''.

"There's no reason at all that the others can't speak in support of all that they need in that time and inject some discipline and improve the standard of debate,'' he explained.

Obituary, condolence and congratulatory speeches he said were a "quaint and unique'' aspect to the sittings of the Bermuda House of Assembly and he suggested their timing be moved until the end of a day's debate -- if they are kept at all.

But the heart of Mr. Barritt's suggestions is the role of the Parliamentary Questions and Question Period in the Order of Business. With the current rules limiting the two Questions periods to the first hour of sitting but after the congratulatory and condolence speeches, Ministers Mr. Barritt suggested avoid being asked the tough questions verbally.

"As such the parliamentary Questions and burning questions of the day don't get answered except in writing in a speech carefully written by a civil servant,'' Mr. Barritt said.