The pot plant, the commissioner, and a burning desire to be a senator

AROUND the time my secretary threw my marijuana plant out the window was the period when I was expert on the Seanad.

I was editor of Young Citizen magazine, which was published by the Institute of Public Administration to inculcate awareness in school-goers of the governance systems of the nation and of the EU and to develop in them a strong civic spirit.

It failed, mainly because civics wasn’t an exam subject. Since people do what they’re rewarded for doing, students decided the subject was a complete crock and ignored it. After a year, I left and not long after that, the publication folded.

Before I left, and before the marijuana- tossing, I fell half in love with the easeful Seanad and decided to devote an entire issue to it. Not that it had much competition, other than from topics such as how local authorities are funded and how precisely the European Commission relates to the European Parliament. Hold the front page? You could’ve held the entire issue and nobody would have grieved.

But I got hooked on the Seanad, and determined to make our readers interested in, among other things, how senators got appointed. The first route was that a few areas of Irish life got to put their guys into the Seanad. The second route was to be a failure in an election. If you were roundly rejected in a general election, you entered a state akin to purgatory, where you had to trail around the country begging local politicians for Seanad votes.

That meant they got to put you through ritual humiliation, quizzing you on what you would do and not do while never asking the real question, which was “why should I vote for you when you never gave me the time of day up to now?”. That question reflected a fair-minded resolution, on the part of the local politician, to put their support behind whichever candidate was most willing to grovel, fawn and flatter them. The easiest way into the Seanad was to have the taoiseach of the day nominate you.

You didn’t have to campaign or prove anything. All you had to be was a pal of the big guy, whoever the big guy was at the time. I must, I thought, get close to a taoiseach or potential taoiseach, because, you see, by this time I had fallen totally in love with the idea of being a senator. For all the wrong reasons. I didn’t want to be a senator just for the money. I wanted to be a senator for the money, the hours, (I could happily be a freelance journalist on the off days), the parking (right in the middle of the city), and above all, the title. Senator Terry Prone, I used to murmur to myself to revel in the sound of it, the way we used to write our names on our copybooks followed by Holy Faith Convent, Clontarf, Dublin, Ireland, The World, The Universe. It had a lovely ancient ring to it, as if I were walking around in a sheet, which in and of itself wouldn’t have been bad, given my weight problem. Plus my good friend Gemma Hussey, who’d held the title for a while, said it had a currency in America which was mega. Mention that you were a senator stateside, and the bowing and scraping would do your heart good.

Now, lest you think me shallow in concentrating on stuff no other wannabe senator would consider for a moment, such as the money, the hours, the parking, and the title, let me tell you that in my research, I visited the Seanad, which, back then, felt smaller and considerably shabbier than my Nana’s sitting room and I also interviewed senators and talked to professors. At the end of the research period, I produced a factually accurate supplement, leaving out the suggestions made to me that it was a place for storing the ambitious but as yet electorally unsuccessful, for laundering the electorally trounced and for rewarding loyalty.

I also profiled some of the senators who were good on innovative thought and just as good at rhetoric. The supplement, when published, made the Big Bang you’d expect if you threw a feather into the Grand Canyon — and that was back when the Seanad carried a greater aura, when having the title “senator” attached to your name ensured that ideas you developed or philosophies you promoted made it into mainstream media. Today “blogger” attached to your name will do the same thing, and you don’t even have to leave your own home. Or “activist”. The context has changed. Senator Katharine Zappone didn’t need the title in order to advance her ideas — her own life circumstances and skill created a public persona for her. Ditto Jillian van Turnhout. It’s arguable that neither they, David Norris, Fergal Quinn, nor Ronan Mullen would be any less influential or vocal were the Seanad tent to be folded, than they are now.

Of course, once Enda Kenny, in opposition, announced he was going to give the plain people of Ireland the chance to pull out the senatorial tent-pegs, you’d think its proponents would have gone into overdrive to reform the place and make it more obviously relevant to the citizens. Nope. Even the inestimable Michael McDowell, who’s now fighting for its retention, was part of a Government that, presented with a reform blueprint by then Senator Mary Robinson, took no action to follow that blueprint, even though it had three years in power after its publication.

So now the Taoiseach’s referendum is coming up and if it passes, I’ll have no chance, ever, of becoming a senator. Although, with my cannabis-conflicted past, that’s probably only fair.

YOU see, around the time the Seanad supplement was in gestation, the Institute of Public Administration was formally visited by the then Garda Commissioner. He was expected to meet lecturers and the editors of publications such as the big diary and Public Affairs, but nobody expected him to visit the extension where Young Citizen lived. He nonetheless decided to do just that, which was why my secretary suddenly arrived in my office, grabbed the plant the girls had given me on my birthday and — with an athleticism that spoke to her years of high-level hockey — turfed it straight out the window before turning to me with an index finger vertical across her lips: Shut up, ask no questions, make no comment.

At that moment, the Garda Commissioner entered the office, covered in IPA managers. I dutifully told him about the importance of the Seanad. His eyes glazed over and I feared he might look out the window and ask about the shards of terracotta all over the grounds, but he didn’t. It was only when he was very definitely off the premises and out of the grounds that I was told the plant was marijuana. I’d lovingly cared for it without ever spotting it for what it was.

The girls who’d clubbed together to buy it to mark my 19th year said it was great craic altogether, me constantly inviting people to admire it. And calling it my pot plant.