The Seanad voting deadline for the postal vote for six senators on the two university panels closed on Wednesday morning, with a turnout of less than 25 per cent expected.
The postal ballot for the five vocational panels closes on Thursday at 11am after which counting will begin and is expected to continue through the bank holiday weekend.
There are 60 seats in the Upper House. The 174 TDs in the Dáil, 60 outgoing senators and 949 local authority councillors are the electorate for filling 43 of the seats on five Seanad vocational panels. Graduates of National University of Ireland (NUI) institutions and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) vote for the six seats (three in each) on the NUI and University of Dublin panels respectively. The final 11 Seanad seats are appointed by the Taoiseach.
Five former TDs who lost their seats in the general election are among the candidates for the vocational panels, including former Fianna Fáil minister Anne Rabbitte; her Longford-Westmeath colleague Joe Flaherty; former Fine Gael TD Alan Farrell; and former Independent TDs Cathal Berry from Kildare South and Matt Shanahan from Waterford.
Eleven former senators were elected to the Dáil – five from Fine Gael, four from Fianna Fáil and two from Labour.
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Fine Gael is under pressure following the party’s failure to elect any women to the five vocational panels in 2020. Then taoiseach Leo Varadkar subsequently nominated four Fine Gael women as Senators.
Counting will start with the Education and Cultural panel, which has 21 candidates out of a total of 111 candidates for the five panels.
Meanwhile, graduates of Trinity College and the NUI colleges each get to elect three of the 60 senators.
Some 76,000 Trinity graduates are eligible to vote and as of Tuesday there was a 22 per cent turnout with 16,729 voting papers returned, with expectation of more in Wednesday morning’s post. In the 2020 election, turnout was 23 per cent.
Outgoing Senators Lynn Ruane and Tom Clonan are seeking re-election with one seat vacant following the retirement of David Norris in January 2024. Of the 16 candidates in the race, former minister for children Katherine Zappone has the highest profile. Other contestants include former Green Party minister Ossian Smyth and party councillor Hazel Chu.
Labour’s candidate is lecturer and scientist Sadhbh O’Neill while former Irish rugby international Hugo MacNeill is running for a third time, having unsuccesfully contested the 2020 election and the 2022 byelection to succeed Labour’s Ivana Bacik following her election to the Dáil. Aubrey McCarthy, entrepreneur and founder of the charity Tiglin, is also a candidate.
On the NUI panel the three outgoing senators - Alice Mary Higgins, Michael McDowell and Rónán Mullen - are all seeking re-election. The 12 candidates also include UCD associate professor Marie Keenan; eye surgeon Dara Joseph Kilmartin; Green Party Dún Laoghaire councillor Eva Dowling - a former adviser to former minister Ossian Smyth; geriatrician Rónán Collins and arts manager, former solicitor and political advisor Linda O’Shea Farren, who has contested the Seanad elections on a number of occasions.
For the NUI colleges the electorate is currently 112,832 with a turnout estimated at 33,000. Registrar Dr Patrick O’Leary said a first count is possible late on Wednesday night but both NUI and Trinity expect final counts by Thursday evening.
The NUI will be the Central Registration Authority for the new higher education constituency, established after legislation was passed to expand the electorate to 15 colleges including the technological universities. The two Seanad panels will become one higher education constituency electing six Senators at the next election.
“It’s a completely new system and people will have to register again,” said Dr O’Leary. As of now 65,000 people have registered for the new constituency. “Unless you make a claim you won’t be able to vote,” he said.
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