The Seanad has never been a seat of democracy and should be abolished

MY neighbour, Hamish McKean, and I shared a unique experience the other night, at 11.29pm.

I remember the time, because I found Hamish standing, alone, in the middle of the green space in our park. He was gazing up at the night sky.

“Everything okay, Hamish?” I asked. “Wait there,” he said. “At 11.31pm, exactly, the International Space Station will be passing directly overhead.”

So, we both stood in silence (not quite sure why, but reverence seemed appropriate), and, sure enough, at 11.31pm, there it was. Like a cluster of bright stars in the sky, the space station raced overhead, seeming to come from the direction of the Sugarloaf Mountain, down beyond Bray, and out over the sea at Dun Laoghaire.

You don’t often get a sky as clear as it has been for the past few nights, so, even though the space station circumnavigates the globe every few hours, our chance to see it clearly is rare enough.

Hamish is an expert on the subject, and told me that the reason the space station was so bright was because its solar panels are positioned to catch the rays of the sun, and that it was travelling at 17,000 miles an hour. It’s only 200 miles away, apparently.

It wasn’t the only unique experience of the week. On the same day, the Government announced its intention to ask the people to abolish the Seanad, in a referendum in the autumn.

Imagine, politicians abolishing political jobs, and a Taoiseach asking the people to do away with one of his greatest pieces of patronage, his capacity to appoint 11 plum jobs. There’s only one question to be asked, and answered, in relation to the Senate. Will its removal undermine our democracy?

I’m conscious, as I write this, that fears are growing for the health, and possibly the life, of one of the greatest democrats in history, Nelson Mandela. This is a man who spent a significant proportion of his life in jail for democratic values, who fought, on his release from prison, to reconcile his country through democratic means. If anyone has taught the world the meaning and importance of democracy, it is Nelson Mandela.

It might sound odd, but if you respect and admire someone like Nelson Mandela, you can’t approach a subject like the abolition of the Seanad without asking yourself whether its removal will damage our democracy. My answer, for what it’s worth, is that, throughout its history, the Seanad has never added democratic value, and its removal will, at the least, do no harm. In fact, if the debate focuses attention on the need to give meaning and life to the Dáil, that would be the healthiest development of all. (I’ll return to that subject by and by, because there are more fundamental reforms necessary than have been proposed).

Twice in my life, all I had to do was ask and I could have been one of the Taoiseach’s 11 It was a tempting proposition (although, in either case, I’d only have been a senator for a few weeks) After all, once a senator always a senator. The salary is pretty good, especially if you don’t want to do anything, and the perks are even better. Even if you’re only a senator for a week, you’re guaranteed lifelong access to the Dáil library and bar, and, even better, you can use the best car park in Dublin city centre for free.

But what’s it about? Sure, there have been great senators, great debates and great speeches — I can still remember a powerful speech made by my friend, Pat Magner, in the Senate during a debate on capital punishment. But people like Mary Robinson, David Norris, and many others who have graced the Senate over the years, never really needed the platform of the upper house. They would always have had the capacity to build their own platforms around the issues they believed in. We’re going to be presented with a false alternative in the debate: don’t abolish the Seanad we’ll be told, reform it, instead. The people who will lead that campaign will tell us, in exactly the same breath, that the Dáil is unreformable.

There is an essential difference between the Dáil and the Seanad. The Dáil is elected by the people, the Seanad isn’t. The Seanad belongs to a small group of entrenched people. I’m not talking about the fewer than 1,000 councillors who form the nominal electorate of the majority of the seats.

It’s the national executives of the main political parties who decide who can be a candidate. Without their imprimatur, it’s impossible to get elected to the 43 ‘vocational’ seats.

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 senators is determined by the tiny handful of people who control the main political parties in government and opposition.

But, of course, there’s the university panel, a wildly out-of-date electoral register with miniscule participation. It fits all the definitions of a rotten borough. It’s quite amazing that we have ever, at any time in our history, seen fit to take any university senator seriously. It’s a tribute, in its own way, to the quality of many of the personalities who have become university senators that they have carried such respect, because there is nothing in their mandate that entitles them to it.

NOT only has the Seanad never acted as a check-and-balance within the system, but it was never designed to do so. Its artful construction meant that there was always (barring an accident) an in-built majority for the government of the day, and it has seldom functioned as anything more than a time-wasting exercise.

We do desperately need checks and balances in our system, there’s no doubt about that. They can only come about through dramatic reforms of the guillotine and whipping systems in the Dáil, and such changes would make a profound difference. But the Senate is a fossil, a meaningless artefact that adds no fundamental value. That’s not to say, of course, that the Government is bound to win the argument. They have already demonstrated an unerring capacity to make a mess of referendum campaigns, losing one and almost blowing another.

If the Taoiseach and Tánaiste don’t get out and campaign seriously for abolition — and if they don’t take equally seriously the need for meaningful Dáil reform — they could lose this one, too. And they’d have no one to blame but themselves, if that happened.