If the Seanad has a point, it is surely to extend the range of voices beyond the professional political class, writes Fintan O'Toole
The white envelopes with blue lettering have been sitting there for weeks now. You've been meaning to fill out the ballot paper and post it back. You are vaguely aware that if you don't do it today it will be too late. But it hardly seems to matter greatly.
And yet, strange as it may seem, Trinity voters in the Seanad elections have the opportunity to do something genuinely historic. With the small effort of sending back their votes today, just in time for the close of polling at 11 a.m. tomorrow, they can punch a hole in the most disgraceful barrier to the emergence of a genuinely open society in Ireland. They can have an effect no less symbolically important than the election of Mary Robinson to the presidency in 1990.
Trinity voters can support Rosaleen McDonagh, who has already made a bit of history. Last autumn, when she got her MA from Trinity, she became the first member of the Travelling community to get a postgraduate degree. Her achievement is disgracefully remarkable. All the pride that a highly-intelligent young woman should feel at her academic success carries with it the shame for the rest of us that what ought to be quite normal is in her case utterly extraordinary.
Her earliest memory is of a fire in the tent she was sharing with her sisters in a field in Sligo. She was carried to safety. Carried because she has been severely disabled from birth. Such early memories are precious because, from the time she was four, she was taken away from her family and placed in a special school in north Co Dublin.
The next thing she remembers is her long hair being cut off. And then the experience of being doubly separated from the world: a disabled child in an able-bodied society; a Traveller in a settled culture. With disability came a low level of education and expectation: being taught how to knit rather than how to think, knowing that your destiny as a denizen of a sheltered workshop was pre-ordained and immutable.
Being a Traveller involved another level of displacement. When other parents came to visit their kids, they were taken into the plush parlour. When Rosaleen's parents came, they were left outside. The codes of femininity which she learned from her own culture - ways of dressing and behaving, with their own finely-tuned notions of what is appropriate and of what is modest - were dismissed with the promise: "We'll get that Traveller look off you."
Most of us can date our awareness of politics to arguments at the kitchen table or school debates. Rosaleen's first sense of how the world was structured came when a Jewish girl she met in the girl guides asked her home to tea and the nuns told her: "You can't go home with that Jew." At Christmas, though, her Jewish friend sent her a chocolate-coloured Indian doll. The stubborn pride she took in her black doll, while all the other girls had Barbies, was the beginning of a certain obstinacy.
The other stray image that lodged in her head was a snatch of a song on the radio. It was during the campaign against Travellers living on the side of the Tallaght bypass. A brick was thrown through her family's window. The radio was playing Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run: "Tramps like us/ Baby we were born to run."
IF she ever doubted, though, that Irish society had no place for her, what happened after she left the special school made it perfectly clear. At 18, she went back to live with her family, but it was almost impossible for a woman in a wheelchair to live in a caravan.
The health board decided to remove her, but the only place they could think of putting her was in an old people's home. It was a very plush private institution, so plush that its owners would not allow Travellers inside the door. So for two years she lived with women in their seventies and eighties and was not allowed to see her own family. She liked her fellow inmates and learned from them the history of modern Ireland she had never been taught. But the isolation was unbearable.
Eventually, she found from somewhere the self-respect and courage to educate herself to a point where Trinity accepted her as a mature student. Through the disability activist Donal Toolan, she got involved in the disability rights movement. Through Martin Collins, she joined the movement for Travellers' rights.
No Traveller has ever held elective office in national politics. Travellers are barely recognised as citizens. Ireland's indigenous ethnic minority suffers all the consequences that flow from that exclusion: discrimination, poverty, contempt. This matters not just to Travellers, but to a society that needs a sense of genuine pluralism to survive.
More broadly, there is a need for parliamentary democracy to incorporate the first-hand experiences of those most directly affected by its decisions. If the Seanad has a point, it is surely to extend the range of voices beyond the professional political class. Imagine how debates on disability, or institutional cruelty or Travellers' rights, would be affected by having within earshot a voice like Rosaleen McDonagh's. How often do you get to make a bit of history just by posting an envelope?