The Seanad is a waste of taxpayers’ millions and should be abolished

And you can’t defend something that, when you boil it all down, really makes no contribution at all. As a body, despite costing tens of millions a year, it adds nothing to public discourse or debate, and hasn’t done so for years. It has no role whatever in terms of providing checks and balances.

I SUPPOSE, in a way, the announcement of the Taoiseach’s 11 was the last straw for me.

The Taoiseach of the day has the right to pick 11 senators, and of course this right was built in just in case the elections to the Seanad ended up in a situation where the country became impossible to govern. Giving the Taoiseach of the day the right to hand-pick between a fifth and a quarter of the Seanad was designed to ensure that no government had to face an opposition majority in the Upper House.

No doubt that’s a sensible proposition. However, a day or two prior to naming his 11, our present Taoiseach, in the context of honouring Pádraig Harrington, had bemoaned the fact that Ireland has no systematic way of honouring people who have made an outstanding contribution to the country over time.

But of course, the Taoiseach has the unique ability, should he wish to do so, of allocating some at least of his 11 places to such people. Not only would that be a significant thing to do in and of itself, it would even give the Seanad some meaning.

It might be the case that someone like Harrington shouldn’t be honoured in this way until his playing days are nearly over. But someone like DJ Carey would fit the bill perfectly in terms of sports personalities who had given impeccable service, wouldn’t he? And it wouldn’t be difficult to list off the names of artists, writers, playwrights, actors, musicians, business people, educationalists, researchers, public servants and a host of others who have done their country some service over many years.

One could imagine some of the retired public servants who had played a crucial role in the Anglo-Irish peace process, for instance, in the role of outstanding senator. Or even someone like Michael Smurfit, an Irish businessman who has built an international reputation for quality.

Instead of even thinking along those lines, however, the Taoiseach used his nominating power — with one exception — for entirely party political purposes, producing a strikingly lacklustre and forgettable list. And the only exception he made was to elevate a columnist, Eoghan Harris, who had argued passionately, as only he could, that the issues that came to be known as Bertiegate were actually good reasons for voting for Fianna Fáil in the election, and had dismissed any questioning as nothing more than sermonising or political correctness. In elevating Harris, of course, the Taoiseach wasn’t so much saying thank you to him as offering two fingers to the rest of the media, many of whom had asked hard questions in the interests of professional fairness, despite whatever personal political inclinations they had. But when I said at the start that the announcement of the Taoiseach’s 11 was the last straw for me, what I meant was this. Throughout most of the years I worked in politics, I used to be able to defend the Seanad. Whenever I was called on to do so, I could summon up most of the arguments in favour of retention. The importance of having those democratic checks and balances; the less bipartisan nature of the Seanad, and therefore the more open quality of debate; the important contribution it has made to public discourse in the past. And so on.

Of course, I was always willing to agree with those who called for reform. How could one argue against the potential for more accountability that a vigorous and less partisan Upper House could bring to bear?

Of course one would have to agree with any proposition that would bring about more involvement by the people at large in the political system, and the Seanad could be a vehicle for that kind of change.

But none of it, actually, makes any sense.

You can’t reform something that is so intimately the property of a small group of entrenched people. We know that the Seanad is, in the main, elected by the thousand or so members of local authorities around Ireland, and that’s a pretty tiny electorate in itself. In fact, it really isn’t possible to be a candidate for the Seanad without the agreement of the national executives, and therefore the leaderships, of the political parties.

Even though there are supposed to be a number of outside nominating bodies to ensure that vocational interests are represented, no candidate put forward by any of those bodies has a snowball’s chance in hell of being voted for unless they also have acceptable party political credentials.

In practice, therefore, apart from the senators elected by the universities, the election of the vast majority of them is effectively determined by the tiny handful of people who control the main political parties in government and opposition.

And don’t get me started on the universities, the rottenest borough of them all, with a wildly out-of-date electoral register and absolutely miniscule participation.

And you can’t defend something that, when you boil it all down, really makes no contribution at all. As a body, despite costing tens of millions a year, it adds nothing to public discourse or debate, and hasn’t done so for years. It has no role whatever, never mind a meaningful role, in terms of providing checks and balances. It can neither delay nor improve legislation, and it certainly can’t initiate it. In other jurisdictions, bicameral systems were either inherited or established for real purposes.

TAKE Britain where the House of Lords owes its existence to tradition alone, and has been under real threat for years, without anyone arguing that democracy would be undermined if it were to disappear. In the US, the second house was created to ensure equal representation for all the states — that’s why there are two senators for each state irrespective of population — and with a better division of work and responsibility between the upper and lower houses. Without wishing to oversimplify it, the House of Representatives in the US Congress tends to look after domestic policy, while the Senate has a powerful voice on issues of peace, war and foreign policy. Our Seanad has no such defined function. There is no aspect of public life, public debate or public policy that would suffer if the Seanad never turned up.

There is no added value in terms of public representation because the Seanad has no mechanism for holding ministers to account for their actions. Of course, it’s true that the Seanad over the years has produced good, hard-working senators, many of whom have used their positions for public good. And it has produced some national treasures like John A Murphy and David Norris who would have had to find alternative platforms had the Upper House not existed (the advent of new radio stations has gone a long way to solving that problem).

But the people are one thing, the institution another. With the possible exception of the elected members themselves (and I doubt if it’s true of all of them), nobody gives a damn about the Seanad. It has long since reached its sell-by date, and it should be abolished.