Seanad Dodges Bullet, State Remains Critical

Abolishing the Seanad should have been as easy as knocking the head off a thistle. The thing does nothing. Even the anti-abolition side in the referendum campaign acknowledged that much (apart from a single, bizarre instance of groupthink, more of which anon). And even though all the No advocates trumpeted reform, reform, reform at every turn, reform was never an option. The sovereign people were asked to vote on whether the Seanad was to stay or to go. Nothing else.

So were the people hoodwinked by this talk of reform, whose chances are about the same as Ireland qualifying for the World Cup – possible, certainly, but by no means probable? Or did something else happen?

Your faithful correspondent has two theories about this. The first is that the Seanad was saved because the Yes side made such a tremendous hames of their campaign. Referenda are adversarial contests, like trials in courts of law. If you want to make a case, you don’t spare the blade – you go straight for the jugular.

It was suggested at the start of the summer that if the Government did want to shoot down the Seanad, it had to make the case that the Seanad was a rabid dog that must be shot for the safety of the community. Scaremongering? Of course, but certainly how referenda have been fought here in the past – hello divorce, goodbye Daddy, vote no to Lisbon/Nice to avoid being conscripted into the pan-European army, vote yes to Lisbon/Nice or else have the Albanians holding telethons to feed the starving Irish, and all the rest of it. Dirty of course, but politics is a dirty game.

What did we get instead? The world’s most watery excuse, that the abolition of the Seanad would save €20 million per year. In ten days’ time, the nation will be looking at steering a €3.5 billion budget “adjustment” through the houses of the Oireachtas. €20 million is 0.0057% of €3.5 billion, five thousandths of one per cent. Doesn’t seem like a lot in the bigger picture.

Did the Government then hammer the Seanad as useless, a drain on scarce resources, a dead weight in the body politic? No, it did not. A meme developed during the campaign that great additions had been made to Irish public life by Senators like Gordon Wilson, Mary Robinson, David Norris and WB Yeats. And this was accepted across the board, instead of being attacked in every instance.

Gordon Wilson’s great moment of forgiveness occurred in a TV interview, not the Seanad chamber. Mary Robinson jacked in her job as First Citizen of the sovereign Irish nation to trade up to the UN, treating the highest office in the land as nothing more than a stepping stone, a back to climb upon on her way to higher ground. (Robbo was also the victim of a truly vicious yet strangely endearing autobiography review by her one-time compatriot Mary Kenny in the Spectator magazine last year). And Norris could have been dismissed by simply playing VT of his extraordinary and disgraceful attack on Regina Doherty at the start of the campaign over and over again.

None of this is very nice and almost none of it is even fair but again, we’re playing politics here. This is how the game is played.

WB Yeats is the most interesting of the four Senatorial icons, but again the Yes side failed to point out that there is virtually no similarity between the Free State Senate of which Yeats was a member and the modern Seanad, of which both Richard Bruton and Labour’s chief (if not only) Yes advocate, Alex White, were members.

And this is perhaps what was the final nail in the Yes coffin. It was impossible, in the end, to figure out just where the Seanad ended and the rest of the body politic began. What made the Seanad so much worse than the county councils below it or the Dáil above it?

The Seanad has sixty seats. Three are for Trinity Senators who talk among and are admired by themselves, and are utterly irrelevant to anyone else. Three are for NUI Senators, who have been a mixed bag between teachers’ union hacks, wannabe Trinity Senators and Rónán Mullen.

There are eleven Taoiseach nominees, most of whom are party hacks or those to whom the Government party owes a favour. And then there are the forty-three others, county-councillors elected by other county-councillors in a tightly closed and confined bubble where a single preference in the twelfth county can be the difference between success and failure.

Political paths go from the council to the Dáil. Some councillors stop off on the Seanad, either on their way up or as a safety net from not having made the leap to the Dáil. It is one-half nursery and one-half nursing home. Nothing else. All this talk about scrutiny and safety valves is blather.

And it’s blather because the majority of Ireland’s laws are now made in either Brussels or Berlin. Gavin Reilly, the excellent political correspondent at Today FM, reckons "over 500 EU-related statutory instruments signed by ministers without parliamentary input," which then begs the question of what exactly it is the Dáil does.

And this is the second reason the Seanad hasn’t been abolished. The people didn’t see the point of abolishing the Seanad because they felt it would change nothing.

The people, based on the result of this referendum, the turnout of recent referenda, and the extraordinary prevalence of independents as viable Dáil candidates suggests that the people have almost given up on the very notion of governing their affairs, and are reasonably content to let faceless mandarins in the EU run the shop.

The Irish nation don’t cherish independence anymore. The founding moment of the state, the 1916 Rising, is being airbrushed into the background by this totally spurious "decade of commemoration," and nobody seems to mind. The Irish nation not only no longer knows who it is, but it no longer cares. We are on the verge of giving up, and letting the country be ruled from outside once more.

This is the real lesson about the state of democracy in Ireland in the aftermath of the failed attempt to abolish the Seanad.

The Seanad Referendum: Why Go Looking for Trouble?

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

The last thing a sensible person should go looking for in life is trouble. Why would you go looking for something that is more than willing to come looking for you?

When Enda Kenny was elected Taoiseach two years ago, trouble was the one thing in the country that was not in short supply. The country was broke, nobody could go for a bag of chips without checking with first with Berlin if they could have both salt and vinegar, and it wasn’t so much a question of hoping the 80s wouldn’t return as praying to the living God that we wouldn’t be pitched all the way back to the 50s, or worse.

In those stormiest of days, Enda kept a steady hand on the tiller. He held his nerve in Europe and has reaped rewards. The bailout will soon be over. The man should be hailed a hero.

But that’s not what’s happening. For reasons best known to himself, when he should be basking in the warm glow of clear and visible success, the Taoiseach and his government have got themselves mired in two crises from which the rewards if successful are slim, and the punishments if unsuccessful and many and painful.

On abortion, the Government’s handling of the hottest of Irish political potatoes for the past thirty years has been anything but sure, and the outcome of current moves to legislate for the X-Case is anything but certain. The battle is very far from over.

All this was trouble that the Government didn’t need with the economy in such dire straits – and don’t forget, even though the Government has done great work, the country is very, very far from saved yet. As such, with the huge issue of the economy looming over the state like the iceberg over the Titanic, and the abortion nightmare rearing its head again, the very last thing the Government needed to do was to hold a referendum that isn’t wanted by the people, that is unpopular among their own parties, that is badly thought out, difficult to explain and can only lead to heartache and woe down the line. And yet, for reasons best known to themselves, that is exactly what the Government has chosen to do.

The first Seanad was founded under two noble auspices. It was set up as part of the 1922 Free State Constitution with a view to protecting  the Protestant minority in the Free State, a protection that minority badly needed – their treatment in the triumphalist early years of the State should be a cause of burning shame to every Irish citizen.

When Eamon DeValera introduced his own constitution in 1937, he retained the second chamber but built it around the idea of vocationalism. Vocationalism was the idea that there was a Christian (ie, Catholic) social order, where everyone had a place and there was a place for everyone, a doctrine that was worked out in papal encyclicals from Leo XIII and Pius XI.

This is where the idea of the panels in the Seanad come from, that each social order would be reflected in the various panels. The Seanad recognises five vocations in Irish life, and categorises them as Agriculture, Labour, Administration, Cultural and Educational, and Industrial and Commercial. Farmers, manual workers, civil servants, teachers and shopkeepers to you and me.

And this is where it gets tricky. How relevant vocationalism is in the 21st Century would be more a matter for Father Hoban over the way but Leo XIII reigned at the end of the 19th Century and Pius XI until the start of the Second World War and neither of those may be considered today or yesterday. There are big changes in the world since.

And even if it were relevant, if vocationalism were a magic bullet of social organisation and cohesion, exactly how much of a role does it play in deciding whom is elected to which panel? What qualifications must you hold to get on the Agricultural Panel, or the Industrial and Commercial Panel? How come you’re on one and not the other?

And what of the baroque inside-out method of filling those Seanad seats? We enjoy elections in Ireland – why don’t we hear more about the inside and outside panel seats, who’s been nominated by what body, what difference .874 votes can make on the 13th count? Isn’t all the world’s drama there? Or does the fact that the Seanad currently does as much work as a child’s rocking horse pulling a plough take something of the bloom from the rose?

This is another problem with this referendum. Both sides are as one in saying that the current Seanad is a crock. The Government says wreck it, the Opposition says reform it.

But if the referendum is lost, will the Seanad ever be reformed? Or will it just tick on like it does, filling inside and outside seats in panels of Administrators, Educators, Labourers, Industrialists and Farmers who do not themselves administer, educate, labour, indust [sic] or farm? Is there any way the people can win in this, or do they end up with the worst possible option, yet again?

It’s early days in the campaign yet, but it’s interesting to note that the Government has not gone bald-headed in an attack on the Seanad. To win the election, they should portray the Seanad as a rabid dog that must be shot on sight for the safety of the village. Instead, they’re portraying the second chamber as Old Shep, who has to be taken back the land by his weeping master, holding his shotgun in one hand and his spade in the other. Who wants to pull that trigger?

Of course, politicians can’t go bald-headed and attack the Seanad for doing nothing because it’s they themselves that are inside in it, doing that same nothing. Hasn’t anybody thought this out beforehand? With everything that that needs doing in the country, with everything the Government have on their plate, why would they bother with the Seanad? Why are they looking for trouble?