Colum Kenny: Unreformed Seanad staggers on

I have two votes to cast in the current Seanad election. On principle, I will cast neither. For most Irish people have no say in the outcome.

Citizens trying to afford a home, worried about rising rents, low pay, healthcare and short-term job contracts look at the Oireachtas with disbelief if not anger.

One House struggles now to overcome party self-regard to form a government. It does business in ways and at a pace that few employees recognise from their workplaces.

The other, our Seanad, is a symbol of the failure to reform Irish systems of administration and regulation. Yet politicians from parties that had pledged reform but failed to deliver it are, as usual, champing at the bit to get places there.

Only members of the incoming Dáil and outgoing Seanad and certain councillors are eligible to vote for 43 of the Seanad’s 60 seats. It’s an exclusive club.

Each may cast five votes across panels that supposedly ‘represent’ vocational interests namely, culture and education; agriculture; labour; industry and commerce; public administration. Ordinary citizens have no direct say.

The Taoiseach also gets a free run at directly appointing 11 more senators, who may or may not be political hacks depending on whim. It is an entirely subjective honours-system.

Councillors and deputies rarely pick people for Seanad seats based on who would win a fair competition, but use the Seanad to console or reward party supporters.

If members of vocational bodies could themselves select each Seanad panel, there would be little chance that many who will now become publicly-paid senators would be chosen. There are better-qualified persons.

I have two votes in Seanad elections because I graduated first from the National University of Ireland and then from Trinity College Dublin. Graduates of these two institutions may elect three senators each. Graduates of DCU have no vote. Nor do graduates of the University of Limerick. Nor do other citizens.

Charade

For NUI and Trinity graduates to continue to participate in this discriminatory charade, either as voters or as candidates, seems inexcusable. Where is the intellectual integrity? The very notion of seats reserved for graduates is questionable.

But it has long been possible for the Oireachtas at least to widen the university franchise, and in one small way to show itself serious about political reform. In 1979 a referendum mandated the Oireachtas (by a majority of 12 to one) to widen the electorate for third-level seats. But the legislation has never been passed.

NUI and Trinity senators might have boycotted the Seanad to force at least that minor change. But the referendum did not mandate extra third-level seats. So a reform would water down the NUI’s and Trinity’s privilege.

And what of more general Seanad reform? In 2013 voters rejected a crude proposal to abolish the Upper House. Only 39 per cent of the electorate even bothered to vote in that referendum.

Lazy proposal

The Government’s proposal simply to abolish the Seanad was lazy and unconvincing, and was followed by no more serious one. We are stuck with an unreformed House.

Voters treated the abolition idea with contempt, as more recently they treated a referendum on the age of the president. Rejection of the latter was a straw in the wind of mounting public anger, but media hoopla around same-sex marriage obscured what the second vote that same day signified. The Government ignored it to its cost.

Seanad Éireann was conceived in the 1920s as an institution in the election of which voters generally could have a say. But political parties soon stifled that idea lest senators become a constant irritant.

The Seanad has almost never used its legislative powers to make a difference. It would be better to have an advisory chamber that actually represented professional, vocational and other organisations.

It is a pity the old parliament building in College Green was not taken back from the Bank of Ireland as part of the banking sector’s rescue deal and put to use as some kind of new and imaginative Seanad comprised of cross-Border membership.

Imagination and inspiration are not words that spring to mind as we watch a hung Dáil fumble its way through the commemoration of 1916, and see a Seanad being selected along narrow political lines.

The new Dáil includes many well-meaning deputies. They are already talking about a new committee to talk about reform. We won’t hold our breath.

Dr Colum Kenny is emeritus professor of communications at Dublin City University.