New zeal for Seanad reform only comes after the death knell has already sounded

World of Politics with Harry McGee

The argument for saving the Seanad is a bit like the way we tossed up the prospects for Galway’s senior footballers ahead of their clash with Mayo in Pearse Stadium two weeks ago. Deep in our hearts we felt we might just have a chance and you’d never know; the lads might just pull it off against the odds.

Meanwhile our heads kept on repeating ‘not a chance, not a chance’ over and over again – and so it proved . . . doubly so.

The same goes for the Seanad. We who write about politics for a living feel a bit of a grá for it, a tinge of fondness, a tincture of nostalgia.

When we take the calculators out, and run the spreadsheets and pore over the graphs with our cold unflinching eyes (well, shifty rheumy eyes), the case for preserving the Seanad becomes a far less attractive proposition.

It costs over €10m a year to run and doesn’t really do very much. If you wanted to be very cynical, what it boils down to is 60 underworked people campaigning to save their soft not-very-challenging jobs.

Since De Valera created the second Seanad Éireann when he rewrote the Constitution in 1937, there have been 12 reports recommending reform of the Upper House.

The last one was completed in 2004 by a committee chaired by Mary O’Rourke. Unsurprisingly, it recommended an increase in numbers, from 60 to 65. But it also recommended that half be directly elected.

Just like all the other reports, it was long-fingered. O’Rourke’s Fianna Fáil Government put it on the same dusty high shelf where its 11 predecessors had been placed by previous Governments. The Seanad had become like an overgrown garden, there all right, part of the house, but ignored and never really used.

And so the long tradition of inertia over what to do with the Seanad might have continued had not Enda Kenny stood up in October 2009 and announced – without warning – that if Fine Gael got back into Government, he would abolish the Seanad.

When I wrote about it at the time I said it was “almost up there with Donagh O’Malley’s free education announcement in 1966 or John A Costello’s impromptu declaration of the Republic while on holiday in Canada in 1949”.

Kenny’s announcement that night was so well guarded that it came as news to most of his own TDs and Senators. Many of the latter, while supporting Kenny publicly, have been fighting a quiet rearguard battle to retain the Seanad ever since.

The momentum for abolition really came when Labour came on board in the run-up to the election and made the same argument. Fianna Fáil also included the abolition of the Seanad in its manifesto but it’s beginning to do a reverse ferret on that also.

When de Valera reconfigured the Seanad in 1937, his most important alteration was to make sure it was shorn of its power. The first Seanad had been a bit of a thorn in his side, and had voted down several pieces of Government legislation.

The new iteration reserved 11 of the 60 seats for the Taoiseach’s nominees, thus more or less guaranteeing a Government majority. Only once in recent history – during the 1994 to 1997 Rainbow coalition – has the opposition control the Seanad.

Even when the government is not in control of the Seanad it makes little difference. The Seanad cannot defeat a Bill. All it can ultimately do is delay the passage of the law for 180 days, after which time it is deemed to have been passed.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.