Remember his name, for he has done his country a significant service. Tomás Heneghan took on the privileged club of Seanad university voters who are presumed exceptionally fit to help shape Ireland, and he won. For more than four years, the young University of Limerick criminal justice and journalism graduate refused to blink as the State threw the kitchen sink and all its silver spoons at him until, finally, the Supreme Court declared: you win.
Where to start with the brazen elitism of a republic that squandered the people’s money in a preposterous attempt to keep the upper doors of parliament bolted against a majority? In 1979, more than 90 per cent of those who voted in the referendum for the seventh constitutional amendment supported the proposal to extend academic graduates’ voting rights for Seanad Éireann beyond the existing constituencies of the National University of Ireland (NUI) and Trinity College. Politicians thought better, however, and opted to continue reserving the club for the cosy exclusivity of Ireland’s poshest universities. In the intervening near half-a-century, successive governments have cocked a snook at the people’s wish in a display of sheer contempt.
At present, six of the Seanad’s 60 seats are filled by the votes of those preferred graduates with another 43 being elected by TDs, senators and about 900 councillors. Not all of these voters comprise what Samuel Beckett called “the cream of Ireland – rich and thick”; only some. Can anyone explain with an iota of logic why a Greek scholar or, for that matter, Danny Healy-Rae is better able to choose a senator than somebody who drives a train or runs a soup kitchen?
Every few years, when a new batch of senators arrives, it is infuriating to see ushers and support staff in Leinster House, many of whom have no say in the composition of the Seanad, instructing the newcomers in its workings.
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It is twice as sickening to watch TDs who have lost their seats in the latest Dáil election swanning into the Seanad chamber for a five-year breather and other aspiring TDs getting an Oireachtas leg-up from their political parties. Their treatment of the Seanad as their property, providing a convenient halfway house for their Dáil candidates, has debased an institution that has much to offer the country.
When Heneghan issued his legal proceedings in December 2018, he claimed that the exclusionary constituencies contravened the Constitution’s equality requirements. The State which, with gobsmacking hypocrisy, is currently encouraging school leavers to consider taking up trades as an alternative to academic studies, defended the inequality. Having a better chance of success after losing his case in the High Court, Heneghan confined his appeal in the Supreme Court to asserting his entitlement to vote as a third-level graduate following the 1979 referendum. When six of seven Supreme Court judges ruled that the exclusion of other third-level graduates was inimical to the Constitution, he was happy but not exactly jubilant.
“My preference is universal franchise,” Heneghan said. “When I sit down at the family table at Christmas, only one-third of my family around it have a right to vote. I couldn’t justify that.”
Undoubtedly, the Trinity and NUI panels have produced many fine senators. Not least is David Norris, the longest-serving member in Seanad history. But the ludicrous notion that only people with an NUI or Trinity parchment are capable of selecting senators is contradicted by the extraordinary levels of popularity enjoyed by Ireland’s presidents in the past 23 years. Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins were elected by universal suffrage, proving that you don’t need a PhD in astrochemistry to be able to pick the ideal person to represent you. Plans are afoot for a referendum to expand the electorate in presidential elections to encompass Irish citizens in Northern Ireland and in the worldwide diaspora. Yet a house of our bicameral parliament is confined to the privileged few.
Even some of the Taoiseach’s 11 nominees have, at times, been among the disenfranchised. Maybe you need to be versed in Ovid and the Saturnian meter for it to make sense that someone can be good enough to sit in the Seanad but not good enough to vote for it.
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Politicians frequently deride the role of the Seanad in private conversation as an impotent talking shop, which evokes another of Beckett’s observations: “There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.”
The truth is that Seanad debates can be more thoughtful and constructive than the political potshots and written speeches that are customary in the Dáil. Whatever one’s view on the merits of the legislation that was planned, the last Seanad’s filibustering of the Judicial Appointments Commission Bill into extinction demonstrated the upper chamber’s considerable influence. The full electorate implicitly acknowledged that when it voted down Enda Kenny’s proposal to abolish the Seanad in the 2013 referendum. In response, the then taoiseach promised to reform the institution.
A decade later, we’re still waiting for that too. At this stage, there have been so many reports on Seanad reform we could carpet a small planet with them. Politicians’ shameless cynicism in keeping it for themselves makes one wonder if it was by accident or design that the constitutional amendment resulting from the 1979 referendum was deliberately “incoherent”. Judge Gerard Hogan has likened the inserted clause to the “attempted cleaning of an old master by a careless restoration artist who then proceeded to leave an ink-stain on a Rembrandt”. Surely not the work of any of the super-smart Trinity and NUI graduates who get to vote for the Seanad.
The Supreme Court has said its finding that the university constituencies are unconstitutional will take effect in July. That means the Government must fix it before the summer recess starts that month. But sticking a Band-Aid on the third-level constituencies to enfranchise about 700,000 graduates will not suffice.
There is a proposal already before the Oireachtas for 28 senators to be elected by all Irish citizens on this island, in addition to the six chosen by graduates. Members of either Houses of the Oireachtas who object to that are unfit to call themselves democrats.