Seanad nominations - Extravagant farce insults democracy

Never has the need for Seanad reform been more apparent than following the appointment of the Taoiseach’s 11 nominations, which were largely an affront to representative democracy.

In the recent General Election the electorate rejected nine of the people nominated by the Taoiseach.

Most eyebrows were raised at the appointment of Ivor Callelly, who was not only rejected by the electorate but also by his colleagues in Fianna Fáil. They declined to give him a nomination for the Seanad election before he was imposed by party headquarters. But he fared dismally in the ensuing election, getting a mere 13 votes, despite having had the advantage of being in the Dáil since 1989 and having served in two different junior ministries.

He was ousted from office because he essentially betrayed the trust of the electorate in accepting favours while in office. On what basis does the Taoiseach justify that appointment — the political maxim of keeping your friends close and your enemies even closer?

The appointment reinforces the image of the Seanad as a halfway house for broken-down politicians.

At least in the case of Brian Ó Domhnaill, a Fianna Fáil councillor from Donegal, he was not rejected by the electorate and his appointment should afford him a chance to demonstrate his political prowess on a broader stage.

Eoghan Harris was the only other person nominated who was not rejected by the electorate in the recent General Election.

He said he has known the Taoiseach for 37 years and thinks his own strong intervention on Bertie Ahern’s behalf on the Late Late Show in the final week of the General Election campaign was probably a factor in his appointment.

At least Mr Harris has shown that he is an independent thinker who is not afraid to support people from various parties. In the past, he was a vocal supporter of John Bruton as Fine Gael leader and of Mary Robinson when she ran as the Labour Party’s candidate for President. But the new senator ridiculed the idea that the Seanad is in need of reform, other than in relation to the university seats.

He talked about the earlier Seanad’s glorious past.

As the second house of the Oireachtas, it previously made some meaningful contributions to debate on reforming legislation, but in recent years it has been little more than an echo chamber of the Dáil.

The more independent voices that Mr Harris lauded have generally come from the university seats, but there is a gross anomaly in their representation.

Graduates of Trinity College elected three senators, the same number as the combined total of the University Colleges in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Maynooth, while the University of Limerick and the other new colleges, such as the various institutions of technology, have no representation at all. This is patently unfair and a further perversion of our democratic process.

In the early years of the State, the Seanad was seen as that part of the Oireachtas in which the country’s Protestant minority was ensured an effective voice. Trinity College is no longer mainly non-Catholic. Thus there is no democratic justification for such disproportionate representation.

The Seanad is becoming an extravagant farce.