Seanad’s future - Abolition an admission of failure

At a moment when the capacity of politics to deliver, lead or even describe the kind of social change and economic rejuvenation we urgently need is in question, the future of an institution as detached and as apparently irrelevant as the Seanad may seem unimportant but, as anyone who does not live in an active, participatory democracy will confirm, it is not.

At a moment when politicians’ venalities provoke a far greater stir than their achievements it is difficult to generate the interest needed to defend a hard-won arm of our democracy, especially as it has become comatose, sidelined and utterly unrepresentative of Ireland 2013.

That all political parties have, once in power, demeaned the Seanad, making it a holding pen for Dáil deputies whose ambition still outweighs the electorate’s appetite for their talents, makes it even more difficult to provoke the kind of passion that was needed to establish these entities in the first place.

That each party has used a Seanad seat as a kind of reward for politicians who may be too old — or too tainted — to contest another Dáil election does not make it easy to argue against the abolition of the institution either.

That government after government ignored 12 reports describing how the Seanad might be reformed is probably the most powerful indictment of all — they simply didn’t think the project worth the effort.

Before the last election Taoiseach Enda Kenny recognised the vulnerability of the Seanad and the appetite for giving politicians a kicking and promised a referendum on the institutions’s future.

He seemed to find the one-stop cure — abolition — far more appealing than the huge challenge involved in making the house relevant.

This position may have served populism but it did not serve politics or our democracy as well as it might have. Since then there has been a debate of sorts — though not at the constitutional convention as Government has bizarrely precluded it from considering the prospect. Nevertheless, a far more thorough consideration must be given to the proposal to axe the Seanad if it is to be put to a referendum in the autumn.

Today a group opposed to closing the Seanad — Democracy Matters — will launch a campaign to try to ensure that any decision reached is an informed one.

There is too the worry that the momentum to close the Seanad is being generated in another institution — the Dáil — that has often seemed in the death’s-hand grip of stasis and unable to reform itself.

As it stands the Seanad does not deserve to survive, but surely it can be reformed. In recent days we have had a glimpse of how a Government with a large majority can feel freed from some of the constraints that shape prudent, wise public behaviour. A reformed Seanad — and then a reformed Dáil — could be a force for great good and progress as well as being a bulwark against dangerous political hubris.

But most of all abolishing the Seanad would be an admission that our political system has failed, that it has choked on its own insularity and conservatism and that it is incapable of change. Not even the institution’s most vehement opponents can want that.