Under fire Senate to sit for one and a half days this week

THE Seanad will sit for just one-and-a-half days this week, despite a number of its members attempting to defend the importance of their work against proposals by Fine Gael to scrap the upper house.

All 57 members will have a day off from normal business because seven of them are in Wales for a meeting of the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly.

The event in Swansea, which is attended by 12 TDs and a number of politicians from the North, Scotland, England and Wales, will conclude at midday today. However, the Seanad will not sit until 2.30pm tomorrow afternoon because of the meeting, an Oireachtas spokesperson confirmed.

Leader of the House Donie Cassidy (Fianna Fáil) said today’s sitting will be reschedule for Friday, November 6. “The Dáil and Seanad sit roughly the same number of days. Last year we sat for 93 days and the Dáil sat for 96 days.”

It’s understood the Government, which no longer holds the majority in the Seanad and is dependent on the support of independents, did not want to risk debating the NAMA Bill while a number of members were away. Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny defended his proposal to hold a referendum on scrapping the Seanad if he is elected to power, saying he could not “justify its existence”.

Mr Kenny denied claims that this represents a major policy change from July, when he told a summer school in Donegal that 20 senators should be chosen by direct election and all third-level graduates should be entitled to elect the six university senators.

“This is something I have been considering for some time,” he said.

“I made it perfectly clear I was considering a real radical agenda here in terms of a change in how we do politics in Ireland and I signalled that,” he added.

Mr Kenny is expected to come under criticism at a meeting of the parliamentary party today for not consulting them on the policy before announcing it at the party’s Presidential Dinner on Saturday night.

But he told RTÉ radio: “I’ve taken a leader’s initiative on this and that’s what leaders are for.”

Former Fine Gael minister Nora Owen criticised the announcement: “I think there are other things that are really hurting people out there in society. If he asked my advice, which he didn’t, I would have said: ‘look, find something where people are really concerned like perhaps house repossession or something that would have got to people to say this is what Fine Gael thinks and can do for you’,” she said on Newstalk radio.

Fine Gael deputy leader Richard Bruton said Mr Kenny was ” showing he is willing to make changes, even though it is not popular within the parliamentary party all of the time”.

“Everybody knows we are going to have to radically reform and that reform has to start in politics.”

Fine Gael senator Liam Twomey said the cancellation of today’s sitting will only feed into negative public perception of the Seanad. “It adds to the perception that there is no function for the Seanad in Irish politics and that has been allowed to develop over the past number of years, in particular by the Government who have completely ignored the Seanad,” he said.