Seanad reformists must make voices heard

Since the then taoiseach Eamon de Valera re-established Seanad Éireann in its current form in the 1938 Constitution there have been no fewer than 10 cross-party reports recommending changes in how the Upper House is elected. None of these reports has ever been implemented and it now appears that this is also to be the fate of the most recent report published by a committee of the current Seanad.

The 60 members of Seanad Éireann acquire their membership in three different ways. Eleven of them are appointed by the taoiseach of the day. Six members are elected by university graduates - three by graduates of the National University of Ireland and three by graduates of Trinity College Dublin. The remaining 43 senators are elected from five vocational panels by an electoral college made up of TDs, outgoing senators and members of the county and city councils.

Within weeks of its election in 2002 the current Seanad held a debate in which there was almost unanimous agreement on the need for change and a recognition that the Seanad itself should take the initiative.

The House then established a committee to examine Seanad reform comprised of the various party leaders in the House. It was chaired by Mary O'Rourke, and included Senators Brian Hayes, John Dardis and Brendan Ryan, with Joe O'Toole representing the Independent members. The committee put a lot of work into public consultations over the summer of 2003. It received more than 160 submissions and held public hearings over two weeks that September.

This committee published its report in mid-2004 and made some useful suggestions about how the Upper House could be given additional functions. It recommended that the Seanad should play a greater role in senior public appointments, in medium-term economic and social policy reviews and in European affairs.

The committee, however, emphasised that enhancing the Seanad's role needed to go hand in hand with broadening its mandate, so it also recommended dramatic changes to how the Seanad was elected. Among the changes it proposed was that 25 members of the Seanad should be elected directly by the people in one national constituency in a poll to be held on the same day as each local and European elections.

After this report was published the urgency went out of the process. A year later the task of reform was handed over to an informal cross-party group to be chaired by the Minister for the Environment. There hasn't been as much as a peep out of the Seanad reform process since. Sadly, the volume of the talk about reforming how the Seanad should be elected has always been in inverse proportion to the proximity of Seanad elections. Even though all of the parties published radical submissions in 2003 they have all gone very quiet on the issue in the intervening two years.

With just about 20 Dáil sitting weeks to go before the next Seanad election no firm proposals have yet been published to implement the reforms recommended by O'Rourke and her colleagues. We are a long way, therefore, from seeing draft legislation or from holding any referendum on any of the changes they proposed. It appears that although politicians (even Senators) of all parties talk a lot between elections about changing how the Seanad is elected, their stake in the current system is such that in reality they are happy to see even their own proposals for reform shelved.

The way our Seanad is currently elected is undemocratic because the electorate is too narrow, is geographically distorted and doesn't reflect the political preferences of the public. A mere 956 people decided who was elected to the five vocational panels in 2002.

The greater Dublin area, which now accounts for about one third of the country's population, had just 130 councillors who are entitled to vote on the Seanad vocational panels. By comparison Tipperary, which has a population less than one tenth that of Dublin, has 47 such councillors. Sinn Féin and the Green Party together won 7 per cent of the seats in the Dáil in the 2002 election but have no representation in the Seanad, whereas Fine Gael, who won 19 per cent of the seats in the 2002 Dáil election, won 30 per cent of the seats in the 2002 Seanad election.

Nowhere is the distorted mandate of the Seanad more clear than in its university constituencies. There may have been some merit in giving three seats to each of two main universities in the 1930s - it had the advantage, in the case of Trinity at least, of allowing for minority representation. However, there is no longer any merit in these elitist constituencies. In their current form they are the modern equivalent of rotten boroughs.

If we must have elections in which only third level graduates can vote then we should, at least, allow all third level graduates to vote in them. In 1989, the people overwhelmingly passed a referendum to widen the electorate for these university seats to all third level institutions. Peculiarly, the Oireachtas has since failed to implement this change, even though these universities now account for an even smaller share of all graduates.

The O'Rourke committee again recommended that one national third level constituency for these six seats should be established. Indeed in its report the committee pointed out that in the public consultation "there was effectively no support whatsoever for retaining the current system that confines university representation to Trinity College Dublin and the National University of Ireland". All it would now take to change the current system is an Act of the Oireachtas, but the odds are very much against that happening before next summer.

It is time for those in favour of Seanad reform to speak up now when it matters most. If not we will be saddled with an unrepresentative and unreformed Upper House for at least another five years.