You may recall that when the people rejected Enda Kenny’s threadbare political stunt proposal to abolish the Seanad, supported by the Labour Party, he remarked that the defeat was a “wallop” for his government. He had even tried to blackmail voters by threatening no reform of the Seanad if his proposal was defeated.
Chastened by that wallop, he established a group to devise proposals to reform the election system for the Seanad under the chairmanship of Maurice Manning, a former TD and Senator and a former president of the Human Rights Commission.
Manning duly reported and recommended a reform that would have given every Irish citizen the right to register and vote for senators elected by the existing panel system or as a higher education voter, without any need for a further referendum under Article 18 of the Constitution. But Kenny, while accepting the report, did nothing to implement it.
Then came the 2016 general election. The new minority government led by Kenny now included Katherine Zappone, a former senator, who demanded and obtained a commitment to implement the Manning report. Again it did nothing to deliver on that commitment.
He was succeeded in 2017 by Leo Varadkar who established an all-party Seanad reform implementation group in 2018 which elected me as its chair. He too had promised the Seanad in 2017 that his government would implement the Manning report and establish an implementation process.
“There will be universal suffrage using the panel system, allowing people to choose which one suits them best”, he said.
Our report, in December 2018, included a lengthy and comprehensive Bill to implement Manning, drafted by a professional parliamentary draftsman paid for by Varadkar’s department.
No sooner did Varadkar receive the report than he privately reneged and ditched it, now claiming again that he was always a Seanad abolitionist. Strange from a politician who, when first elected, championed Seanad reform and who mandated our report on implementation of Manning.
Stranger still, he wrote just before resigning as Taoiseach – but after the recent defeat of his referendum proposals – that the result showed that the people “were wise” to retain the Seanad as “a check and balance on the Dáil”. He perhaps forgot that he had used a party whip to guillotine Seanad consideration of the defeated amendments.
In the second stage Seanad debate on the reforming Seanad Bill on November 18th 2020, Minister of State Malcolm Noonan of the Green Party assured the House that he was “personally committed to achieving this reform” and informed the Seanad that his senior minister, Darragh O’Brien would engage with senators “before Christmas” of 2020 on the issue and would come before the Seanad by May 2021 with reform proposals. He concluded: “I hope these commitments are to the satisfaction of members. I reiterate our commitment to ensuring this happens”.
I responded: “I am convinced by what the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, has said to me privately and has told me I can tell this House publicly, that he is committed to this. I want to put it on the record of the House that the Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, said the same to me today.”
The Greens had been persuaded to omit any reform commitment from the 2020 programme for government in exchange for two Taoiseach’s appointments to the Seanad. Shamefully, and totally cynically, yet again nothing happened. The FF/FG/Green senators voted to deny and delay a second reading for the very Bill drafted at Government expense. Solemn Government commitments were ruthlessly broken. No proposal was ever tabled.
Until the Supreme Court found last year in the Heneghan case that the State was obliged to extend the university franchise to all university graduates, absolutely nothing was done. And now a Bill is promised (but not introduced) that would enable all university degree graduates to vote – but only in the second next Seanad election for six university seats, and no vote for other citizens.
Depending on definitions, six university seats would then be elected by those among about one million graduates who register, but 43 seats will continue to be elected by a party-dominated electorate of 1,283 people – 234 Oireachtas members and 949 local councillors.
That’s not all. At a recent meeting of the Seanad committee on procedures and oversight, proposals which had been drafted by the committee’s secretariat to allow for a secret ballot on the election of the Seanad’s Cathaoirleach and Leas-Cathaoirleach, as now happens in the Dáil, were abruptly rejected without explanation at all by the Government’s members. They want to control the plum jobs politically.
And a newly formed Seanad committee on implementation (or the lack of it) of EU directives, as envisaged by Manning, has been rendered useless by an official policy to prevent any publication of draft implementing statutory instruments on the ground that they are “confidential”.
The only way to end the cynicism, the guillotining of Seanad debate, the stuffing of the Seanad with political wannabes, and indefensible discrimination between graduates and non-graduates, is at the next Dáil elections.