Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It was a shameful gimmick and the Irish people eventually saw through it. Senator Paddy Burke will have his opportunity. The abolition of the Seanad, as proposed by Deputy Enda Kenny, would have left the Constitution in tatters. The checks and balances provided for in the Constitution would have ceased to exist. There are many such checks and balances. I will not recite them all, but I wish to make clear that this House has many serious functions under the Constitution, not least of which is that its assent must be obtained before the Government surrenders our entitlement to unanimity on any issue in the European Union. This House has a veto in that regard and not solely in respect of the removal of judges or the President. The House was designed by former Taoiseach Eamon de Valera to be independent of the Government. If it was not designed to be independent of the Government, would it be the case that the will of this House in objecting to legislation passed in the Dáil could be overridden after 90 days? If it was intended that this House be under the thumb of the Government - where, as currently constituted, it has been kept most of the time - that provision would not be necessary.

The House has a great future in bringing to this Legislature voices which would not simply filter up through multi-seat proportional representation geographic constituencies. I was in Belfast recently with Senator Marshall and I visited at the vacant senate chamber in Stormont. It is now widely understood in Northern Ireland that it needs a forum along the lines of this House, to which members of civil society would be elected on non-party lines by the electorate generally to represent various interests. That is desirable to bring forward different points of view and voices that would not otherwise be heard. Senator Dolan and the university Senators are examples of people who would not, in the ordinary course, find their way up through the geographical mutli-seat constituency system to a single-chamber legislature. Their voices would be lost. I refer to people such as Mary Robinson, who proposed in this House that the law on contraception be reformed. She was told by the then Archbishop of Dublin that she was bringing a curse upon Ireland. The House was so much under the thumb of the Government at the time that it did not even give her Bill a first reading. It refused to allow it to be printed.

One does not have to go back to former Senator W.B. Yeats and his speech on how we are no petty people, to Mary Robinson or to the countless other individuals who contributed in the House through the years - and who would not have been in the Oireachtas if we did not have a Seanad - in order to prove that this House is of significant value. In particular, I wish to mention the late Feargal Quinn who, as a Member of this House, was a great statesman in terms of pursuing various topics and interests of his in the national interest. It is worthwhile reminding ourselves that his final article for The Sunday Business Postwas posthumously published the day after his funeral in Sutton last year. In the article, he pointed out the shameful way in which Seanad reform was apparently being abandoned to the back burner and put for further discussion or polite listening with no action. The decision of the public to retain the Seanad was due, in no small way, to Feargal Quinn's immense popularity. He went around Ireland and stood in town squares and people flocked to him. He reminded them of the value of the Seanad by his simple decency.

When the proposal of the then Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, was defeated in that referendum, he said the people had given him a wallop. He badly abased himself by stating, in an effort to win the referendum, that there would be no reform of the Seanad if the people voted to keep it. That was a shocking statement. It was designed to bully people into disbelieving the possibility that Seanad Éireann was capable of reform and needed to be reformed. After he had been defeated in the referendum, the then Taoiseach slowly came around to the view that he would reform the Seanad because that was clearly the wish of the people in retaining it. He established a group under the chairmanship of Maurice Manning to advise him on how the electoral system for the 43 vocational seats in the House could be reformed without recourse to a referendum in order to make it more democratic and take it out of the hands of 220 Members of the Oireachtas and approximately 1,100 county councillors. Maurice Manning produced the report, which was handed to the Government. His group took submissions from every party and looked at the subject matter inside out. It came up with what it had been tasked with doing, namely, establishing reform without another referendum. What happened next? Nothing happened until pressure came on in the course of the formation of the Government. I pay tribute to the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Zappone, who insisted that implementation of the Manning report be made an aim of the Government. It was included in the programme for Government that was adopted and put before the people. What happened then? Absolutely nothing. There was procrastination and delay until I and other Senators put a Private Members' Bill before the House. At that late stage we were informed that the Government wanted to establish an implementation group to deal with the matter.The implementation group worked long and hard. I pay tribute to Members of this House from all parties, who worked with me to produce a report in accordance with the terms of reference which we were given. We did that. What was our thanks for doing that? It was to receive complete indifference from the Government and, finally, for the Taoiseach to stand up in Dáil Éireann and give the message that if somebody wanted to do something about this, he would not stand in the way. That is the present Taoiseach. As Senator Feargal Quinn pointed out in a posthumous article, the Taoiseach was a person who at one time was an ardent advocate of Seanad reform. In 2007 when he was an earnest Deputy only three months in office, he issued a press release announcing that he had conducted a survey of nominating bodies which play a key role in Seanad elections. He suggested: "This survey exposes the urgent need for Seanad reform", and went on to suggest that this should be the last time the Seanad is elected in this way. Those were the words of the young tyro entering into the political domain, but now we see a very different Taoiseach, a man who languidly and disgracefully said that if somebody wants to do something about this, let them do it. Let somebody propose it in Dáil Éireann and he would allow a free vote. The grace of the man is extraordinary. He said that in the hope that it would be voted down by people who are hostile to it. That contrasts dramatically with the Judicial Appointments Commission Bill which is driven by the Minister, Deputy Ross.