Enhanced Seanad can deliver

The Irish people, recognising the Seanad’s balancing function in the legislative process, have wisely chosen to keep it. However, the referendum’s results show a substantial fraction of the population would have it abolished.

It seems, for them, it is irrelevant because it performs no useful function, or maybe because that performance has not been well communicated. Whatever happened in the past, it is possible for it to become a more modern and relevant institution that can easily be seen as vital to the perennity of Ireland.

Mankind has become a planetary force, able to unfavourably change its climate, acidify and impoverish its oceans, exterminate countless species, and deplete its best forest, fresh water, arable land, and mineral resources. This power has been acquired without a concomitant increase in wisdom. We have discovered how to live long and healthy lives and how to distribute our unsustainable industrial and financial system throughout the world, creating a host of social problems such as the outsourcing of environmental degradation and quasi-slavery to poor countries, permanent unemployment in the richer countries, a growing inability to take care of older people, and the dissolution of traditional social bonds.