More hype than hope in Sinn Féin’s speaking rights campaign

I SAT in Seanad Éireann for an hour one afternoon in September last year. I didn’t become a member of the Seanad or win any elections, or anything like that.

I was simply giving evidence to a committee of senators about a submission I had made about an alternative electoral system.

As it happens their committee sat that day in the Seanad chamber itself, and so I actually got to sit in a seat usually occupied by a senator.

If Sinn Féin MPs, or any other public representatives from Northern Ireland, ever get to ‘sit’ in the Oireachtas, then that will be something along the same lines. They may, some day, get to sit in the actual seats currently occupied by TDs in the Dáil chamber.

However for the foreseeable future there is no prospect of them getting any wider right of audience than I got, by chance, that September day.

It is important to see the recent SF hype about speaking rights in the Dáil in the context of the major concessions which have recently being forced out of the republican movement. As part of the process of conditioning their own core followers for the reality that the struggle to achieve a united socialist republic in Ireland by the Armalite is over, SF has been distracting them with mythological talk about how, despite this, a united Ireland is just around the corner.

The issue of Northern Ireland representatives being admitted to the Oireachtas is not, of course, a new one. In the 1930s Eamon de Valera rejected a similar suggestion from leading Northern nationalists and, in fact, prevented the adoption of a motion at the Fianna Fáil árd fheis urging the inclusion of a right to Northern representation in the new constitution.

In the 1948 election, one of the planks of the manifesto of Sean MacBride’s Clann na Poblachta was the admission of Northern MPs to the Oireachtas.

When Clann na Poblachta subsequently went into the first inter-party government this was scaled back by MacBride to involve a right of audience in the Dáil. However, the then attorney general advised that the provisions of the constitution regarding the delimitation of constituencies, and the relationship between the population and the number of members returned, made it impossible to admit persons representing constituencies in Northern Ireland into the Dáil. The proposal went no further.

In 1951 after returning to power, de Valera argued that “a gesture of this sort” would be of no value in bringing about an end to partition and, on the contrary, would imply a capacity to exercise ‘de facto’ jurisdiction over Northern Ireland.

A proposal to allow a limited right of audience in the Dáil and Seanad was roundly defeated in the Dáil on October 28, 1954, by 100 votes to 21 with both de Valera and John A Costello speaking strongly against it.

The issue was not actually considered in detail again until 1998. In April of that year, after the Good Friday Agreement was reached, Bertie Ahern asked the Oireachtas All-Party Committee on the Constitution, then chaired by the current junior minister Brian Lenihan, to explore “how people living in Northern Ireland might play a more active part in national political life, to the extent that they so desire and in a spirit consistent with the principles underlying the peace settlement”.

The committee having had submissions from, among others, Sinn Féin and the SDLP, and having had legal advice, published a report in 2002 which was strong in its conclusion that a constitutional amendment would be required to confer unlimited rights of audience on any person who is not elected to Dáil Éireann.

The constitutional impediments to a substantial right of audience in the Dáil for Northern Ireland MPs are even greater now. The detailed provisions in our constitution about the membership and election of Dáil Éireann, and about the role and functions of a TD, not to mention the implication of the redrawn Articles 2 and 3 which expressly recognise the Good Friday Agreement, all mean that extending any general right of audience in the Dáil to any person not elected for a constituency in the Republic runs the risk of being struck down by our Supreme Court.

An informal canvass of the opinion of some of the leading constitutional experts in Dublin establishes a consensus on this point.

EVEN the watered down suggestion of some specially constituted Dáil committee to debate Good Friday Agreement-related issues which would include representatives for Northern Ireland, and which for decorative good measure would actually sit in the Dáil chamber, may not necessarily be constitutionally well-founded.

While Northern representatives could give evidence to this proposed Dáil committee (as they have given evidence previously to many Dáil committees), they could not, in the view of many legal authorities, participate otherwise in the deliberations of any such committees or, for example, pose questions to anybody else who gave evidence.

Sinn Féin has been deliberately vague about what it means by “speaking rights in the Dáil”. In their submission to Lenihan’s committee, SF argued that it is the right of Irish citizens resident in Northern Ireland, by virtue of their entitlement under the amended Article 2 of the Constitution, to be part of the Irish nation and to send representatives to the Irish legislature.

This is frankly absurd and fails to have any regard to the distinction in the Constitution (and in reality) between the nation and the State.

If this Sinn Féin contention was accepted, then all the other people who were born on the island or who are of Irish parentage or grandparentage, and are therefore part of the Irish nation, would be entitled to elect the Dáil. That would see the votes of everyone living in the Republic swamped by those of the millions in the Irish diaspora.

In a report in the Irish Examiner of August 10, 2002, during the deliberations of the Lenihan committee, Martin McGuinness illustrated his and SF’s confused understanding of Irish constitutional norms when he suggested that the standing orders of the Dáil could be altered by the Dáil itself to allow Northern Westminster MPs to attend and speak in certain debates.

It depends what you mean by “attend and speak”.

If it amounts to the same way I “attended” and “spoke” in the Seanad in the example I gave above, that would be no problem - but any person, elected or not, enjoys that right at the moment once the Dáil invites them to do so.

The prospect of Sinn Féin MPs sitting in the Dáil, in any real political sense of that word, is very, very remote. There is no political support for it in the Dáil itself, apart from the Sinn Féin TDs.

More importantly there are considerable constitutional obstacles which could only be resolved by a referendum. There is no prospect of such a referendum being held and less prospect of it passing. Bertie Ahern knows that. I suspect the SF leadership knows that too. The only people who give SF’s campaign on this issue any credence are unionist politicians who, again, have fallen for Sinn Féin hype.