Witness to a parliamentary history

Séamus Pattison first served in Dáil Éireann in 1961 – and has worked with TDs who served in every single Dáil known to an independent Ireland

STEPHEN COLLINS

SÉAMUS PATTISON, former Labour Party TD and ceann comhairle, has a unique insight into the history of parliamentary democracy in Ireland. Not only was he one of the longest-serving deputies ever elected to Dáil Éireann, he personally encountered and worked with TDs who served in every Dáil – from the first to the current 30th.

When he was first elected as a TD, in 1961, some of the giants of the first Dáil, like Seán Lemass, Frank Aiken and Seán McEntee, were still leading members of government. When he retired from politics in 2007, Pattison held the post of leas-cheann comhairle at a time when the taoiseach was Bertie Ahern and the tánaiste was Brian Cowen.

Pattison’s recollection of political life in Leinster House goes back beyond the day he was first elected in 1961, at the age of 25. He was a regular visitor to the Dáil from the time he was a child; his father James was a long-serving Labour TD, having been first elected in 1933.

“I remember being here as a kid in the late 1940s, when Queen Victoria’s statue was still on the plinth,” he recalls. “At that time, army sentries with fixed bayonets stood at the Kildare Street gate and the changing of the guard was a feature of the place.”

At that time, there was no Merrion Street entrance to the precincts, and it was not until decades later that the lovely Leinster Lawn was tarmacadamed over to provide parking spaces for TDs, senators, Dáil staff and journalists.

“Most of the TDs didn’t own a car at that time and there was plenty of room on the Kildare Street side to provide parking for those who did,” he says.

Pattison remembers, as a teenager, having meals with his father in the Dáil restaurant and being joined on occasion by Tom Johnson, the first leader of the parliamentary Labour Party. Johnson had helped draft the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil in January, 1919, and played an important role in getting international recognition for it from the International Labour Organisation.

When Pattison was first elected in 1961, things had not changed all that much from the Leinster House of his childhood.

“It’s hard to believe now, but women were not allowed into the bar at that time, not even women who were elected TDs. If they wanted a drink they had to order it from the restaurant and be served there. Funnily enough, the bar was staffed by two women in the early 1960s but women weren’t allowed in as customers.”

The pay and conditions of TDs was also very different from today.

“When I came here first, TDs didn’t have an office of their own,” he says. “You were given a little locker and a key and you put all your earthly goods in there.”

TDs didn’t have secretaries in those days – never mind parliamentary assistants – and all correspondence had to be handwritten. As they had no offices of their own they had to operate out of the party room, where it was often difficult to get a place to sit. As many as 10 TDs at a time jostled for space in the Labour Party room.

“We didn’t have the use of a personal phone; there was only one available for all the Labour TDs and we could only make internal or local calls,” says Pattison.

“If we wanted to ring someone in the constituency we had to go down to the phone kiosks in the corridor where there were coin boxes so that we paid for our calls.”

When it came to letters, TDs had to buy stamps like everybody else, regardless of whether their post involved official business. It was not until a decade later that the practice of free postage for TDs and senators was introduced.

Dáil business was also conducted very differently, with the taoiseach and ministers generally giving curt replies to questions and refusing to be drawn into detailed responses.

“At question time every Tuesday all departments were dealt with in one afternoon. Members were allowed one brief supplementary and it was unusual for a second to be allowed,” he says. “There was no amplification, and replies were often hard to hear – particularly as some ministers, like Jim Ryan, were famous for muttering their replies.”

Accommodation improved with the building of a new office block at Leinster House in 1965 and in the following years the first secretarial assistance was provided for TDs on a shared basis. Initially, there was just one secretary for about 10 TDs and it was not until the 1980s that each member was provided with a full-time secretary.

As facilities improved, the constituency workload taken on by TDs grew heavier and the demands of constituents escalated.

One of Pattison’s favourite stories goes back to a Christmas day in Kilkenny when he was about to sit down to dinner with his mother.There was a knock on the front door and, when he answered, he found a constituent on the doorstep who wanted his help dealing with a routine query.

“You know that it’s Christmas Day,” said the ever-polite TD.

“Of course I do. That’s why I knew I’d find you in today,” responded the unabashed constituent.

It was that kind of accessibility that ensured that he was elected at 12 successive elections as a TD for Carlow/Kilkenny, serving a total of 46 years in the Dáil and ending up as father of the House. He had stints as a member of the European Parliament and a junior minister during the 1980s, but his proudest moment came when he was elected ceann comhairle in 1997.

“It never occurred to me that I would be ceann comhairle, but I was honoured to be chosen for the position,” he says. “One thing that intrigued me was the practice that the ceann comhairle is automatically returned as a TD to the subsequent Dáil without having to stand for election. I could find no other parliament in the democratic world with this practice – I don’t see the point of it.”