A Seanad with part-time senators could represent all sides of Irish life
They have work, of course. Everyone has work. They just don’t have a job right now. They are carers, parents in the home, artists, the unemployed, those with certain disabilities the retired, community volunteers and activists.
A mish-mash of political correctness? Where’s the expertise? Where is the expertise of a jury? It has none except that it is meant to be representative of the society from which it springs. And yet we give juries the power to indict and to free.
Pause to consider the distortion to our governance which occurs because all TDs are full-time professionals. Was it not to avoid sections of the population becoming unrepresented that Seanad Eireann was first instituted by WT Cosgrave in 1922? So central a part was it of the architecture of this State that 37 senators’ houses were burned to the ground by anti-Treaty forces. So now Cosgrave’s political inheritor Enda Kenny wants to abolish the entire chamber in a PR stunt? Reject this crude power grab and demand reform. Demand a “talking shop” which, unlike the Constitutional Convention, doesn’t have its subjects prescribed to it by the Government like extra homework.
Abolish de Valera’s Seanad, by all means. He closed the First Seanad in 1936 because it was delaying his legislation. But don’t abolish it until we have a plan to return to the original inspiration behind WT Cosgrave’s Seanad Eireann and bring it up to date.
The first thing we must do is have a Seanad directly elected by the people from candidates who are neither just out of the Dáil or looking to get back in. The reform proposals of Senator John Crown, Senators Katherine Zappone and Fergal Quinn and the Green Party have suggested elections held on the same day as the General Election. Fianna Fáil suggests they be held with the local and European elections.
But I question the wisdom of that, because what we are looking for is a different thought process for a different product. Could we not hold Seanad elections every seven years, with the Presidential election? Like the President, the Seanad is part of the system of checks and balances which the Dáil needs as it processes legislation. Like the President, the Seanad could embody a bigger, wider, more representative vision than that of full-time legislators. Shut the Seanad and you are putting out one of the eyes of the State. An eye which, despite the blinkers imposed on it by the preponderance of Taoiseach’s nominees and the enforced Government majority, has still managed to host important moments in our national debate.
WB Yeats made a speech to the Seanad against banning divorce in 1925 in which he thundered at the danger of alienating the Protestant minority — “It is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation consider to be grossly oppressive.” It is heart-breaking to think that if we abolish the Seanad, future students would need an explanation as to what the institution was when they study Yeats’s poem written from the stance of a senator, Among Schoolchildren.
Mary Robinson’s first attempt to get a reading of her contraceptive bill in the Seanad in 1971 is famous for what happened outside the house, where Mary Kenny led a rousing rendition of “We shall not, we shall not conceive” to the tune of “We shall not be moved.” Robinson succeeded in getting her bill read in 1974. As recently as 2007 one of her successors as Reid Professor of Law in Trinity College Dublin, Ivana Bacik, got her Climate Change Response Bill read in the Seanad.
All of these interventions were little chinks of light which eventually widened and then opened. They, and countless others like them, are part of the reason why we must retain the Seanad. But we must reform it so that it allows access to those who do not belong to the professional classes. Despite the fact, for instance, that close to half of Irish women are engaged in home duties, the few women who are elected to the Dáil will usually have a background in the professions.
That’s why gender quotas in themselves will not solve the massive problem of gender imbalance in the Dáil. They may help. They may increase the number of women TDs. But I remain unconvinced that they will sufficiently widen the scope of women’s interests which are represented.
The reason for that is that the job of a full-time public representative in a modern, western democracy is so full-on that women with caring responsibilities usually refuse it. You can argue that they have no choice, you can argue that if you put a creche in the Dáil all would be fine.
But I think you would be avoiding the fact that if they have a choice most women with families turn away from having a second all-consuming job.
Fair play to those mothers of young children who do run for public office. They have no doubt worked out a system which works for them and their children, and usually involves a partner who can pick up the slack. I’m thinking here of ex-Minister Mary O’Rourke’s beloved husband Enda, as she pictures him in her autobiography, or ex-Tánaiste Mary Coughlan’s beloved David Charlton, who died so young last year. Some women wait until their children are older to enter public office, such as Olivia Mitchell, TD, whose family was mostly raised when she first ran for the Dáil. But that’s a difficult calculation now that women tend to have their kids so late and parties remain so wedded to the typical continuous male career arc.
Each individual woman must be given the same space in which to make these decisions as a man would have. It was disgusting to see Lucinda Creighton’s “colleagues” speculating that she might “hang up her handbag” after she was forced to vote against her party on a burning issue of conscience.
But the fact remains, I think, that relatively few women with caring responsibilities — usually women in their productive middle years — will choose to even try for full-time public office as a TD. You only have to think of Creighton’s former Fine Gael colleague, ex-TD Olwyn Enright who emphasised that she was making a choice to stay home when she retired from politics in 2010.
I have long argued that a reformed Seanad, consisting of part-time senators not picked through party systems, could represent sides of Irish life which are barely represented at all. I wasn’t expecting Enda Kenny to get up on Tonto and take a pot shot at it. Well, if he’s going to play cowboys, we’re the Indians. Pull your arrow back in your bow and send your “No” singing through the air.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
