Oireachtas reform - A challenge that remains unavoidable

FOR the next week or so the Dáil bar and canteen will host the drawn-out election count for the 24th, and possibly the very last, Seanad.

Counting of votes begins tomorrow morning.

This is as close to being a popular plebiscite election what is grandiosely called the upper house will ever get under today’s arrangements.

Less than 5% of the Republic’s population have any say at all in how 43 of the 60 seats will be filled. The six-seat universities’ panel will be filled by the votes of NUI graduates.

The electorate will have no say at all in who will be lucky — even that is subjective today — enough to be nominated by Taoiseach Enda Kenny in his first opportunity to bestow such high-level political patronage.

This seems a process from another time, a time of velveteen collars and Homburg hats, when deference and privilege were sustained because so many people accepted what was once described as “their place” and the limit of their expectations.

Today it seems an anachronistic and undemocratic form of elitism and would be very difficult to support as a central plank in any democracy. That support becomes ever more unlikely when the political parties’ use of the Seanad is considered. It has been used as a holding pen for spurned Dáil hopefuls, a pit to blood Dáil aspirants or even a way to introduce people who seem to have the right stuff to politics, as Jack Lynch did with Mary Harney all those years ago.

Sadly, this perception of elitism and misuse have made it impossible to defend the current incarnation.

This is reflected in at least 12 reports on the institution, all of which are even more ignored than the laws forbidding the use of hand-held phones while driving a car.

These reports are, like so many others, in the grip of our national disease — the rabbits-in-the-headlights stasis brought on by the fear of change and reform that might mean a moderate challenge for comfortable and entrenched interests.

None of this, though, amounts to an argument strong enough to scrap what could be a very proactive and positive office in a regenerating democracy. After all, the Dáil hasn’t functioned at anything like an optimum level for decades and no one has suggested that we close it.

It is unfortunate, though, that this great clamour for reform of the Dáil and the Seanad comes at a point in our history when we are so stretched. Right now, Government faces so many far more basic challenges than reshaping the Oireachtas but it must, or else it runs the risk of bringing the idea of politics as a way to make a better world into further disrepute and strengthening the cynicism that now greets almost every proposal or promise coming from that profession.

There is a real urgency about all of this and a sense too that we would court failure of an even deeper kind if we do not accept the challenge.