Call for senators who back Seanad abolition to resign

SEANAD REPORT:SENATORS WHO favoured the abolition of the Seanad should resign their seats, according to Michael McCarthy (Labour).

Tom Johnson, the then Labour leader, had told the House in the l930s that for senators to vote for its abolition would be to engage in a self-condemnatory act.

Mr McCarthy said he regarded it as a privilege to serve in the Seanad. He and many other members had been honoured by councillors throughout the country by being voted, through the vocational panel system, to serve in a parliamentary forum.

“I consider it, quite frankly, insulting for any sitting senator to propose the abolition of the Seanad. I would say to those senators, resign your seats or at least get off the Seanad reform committee.” That committee had been established to look at ways of reforming the House and a cross-party consensus had been reached on the matter.

Mr McCarthy said the Seanad should be reformed, but to engage in the kind of populist political point-scoring that had been witnessed recently undermined the role of democracy.

David Norris (Ind) said it had taken the leader of Fine Gael several hours to extract a weak vote of support at “an unusual” meeting of his party members last Wednesday. Mr Kenny had been supported, apparently uncritically and enthusiastically, by the Fine Gael Seanad leader Frances Fitzgerald and her colleagues Liam Twomey and Paschal Donohoe.

Two of those individuals had served previously in the Dáil and seemed intent on returning to it, so they were determined not to remain in the Upper House.

As Mr Kenny’s proposal for the abolition of the Seanad was made in the context of an economic measure, said Mr Norris, it would seem appropriate that this trio, if they continued as senators, would honourably surrender their salaries to projects which they had suggested would suffer financial cuts because of the cost of the Seanad.

Alex White (Labour) complained that Eugene Regan (FG) had misquoted him in the chamber on Wednesday. “I never said that this House served no useful purpose.”

Mr White said he was not a supporter of the Fine Gael party, but for Joe O’Toole (Ind) to describe an apparently genuine proposal to look at institutional reform as a harking back to the l930s was so absurd as to draw the level of debate so far down as to make it not worth having.

Mr Regan said that when Seanad leader Donie Cassidy had defended the House on RTÉ television, Senator White had stated: “Unlike Donie, I think there is a question mark over the relevance of the Senate.” He hoped that clarified the position.

Mr Regan said it was silly to suggest that people should resign from the House in the wake of Mr Kenny’s proposal for a referendum on its future.

“The Senate has a constitutional role and we have a constitutional responsibility and obligation to fulfil until the Constitution has been changed in a referendum.”