Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Sinn Féin will be supporting the Bill. I have to ask, however, why we are here on the Private Members' business time of a Government party not debating the Seanad Bill that was produced by the Seanad reform implementation group? That was a group that involved a cross-party selection of representatives that worked painstakingly for months and that delivered a good Bill at the end of that process. That Bill would legislate to radically reform elections to the Seanad and it includes this very proposal of a single six-seat university and higher education constituency. It would also legislate in order that 43 seats would be elected across the five vocational panels and of that number, 28 seats would be elected by the people of Ireland, Irish citizens from the North and the South who would choose and register to vote on their vocational panel of interest. A regrettable departure from the Manning report and the Seanad Bill from the Seanad reform implementation group is that the Bill before us does not include 15 seats that would be elected by Deputies, outgoing Senators, city councillors and county councillors. Under the Seanad Bill from the Seanad reform implementation group, the 11 nominees of the Taoiseach would remain for now and continue to be nominated by the Taoiseach as it would require constitutional change to alter that but when doing so, as proposed by the Seanad reform implementation group in an amendment passed by me and Sinn Féin, the Taoiseach would factor in and take into account the gender balance and the diversity of representation following a Seanad election.

The Bill to achieve all of this is ready and we should be here discussing the Seanad Bill as proposed by the all-party Seanad reform implementation group. It was set up by the Taoiseach and it met weekly in the Department of the Taoiseach. I and my Sinn Féin colleagues engaged with it in good faith. It is one of the things I am most proud to have been involved with in my term in the Oireachtas. Sinn Féin called for the group to be extended to examine constitutional issues such as the abolition of Taoiseach's nominees, the calling for Seanad elections, as Senator Cassells has mentioned, on the same day as elections to the Dáil, the abolition of a requirement for postal votes, the provision of equal gender representation and the representation of marginalised groups.

We will support the Bill today. It is regrettable on a number of fronts that it divides those who want reform. It perhaps pitches the Trinity Senators against those who are in favour of reform and the Trinity Senators are in favour of reform. It will potentially be a distraction from the Seanad Bill itself, should the Government decide to run with this Bill and use this to show it is reforming the Seanad.That would be a distraction from the Bill. I call on the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, to bring forward the Seanad reform Bill, as proposed by the Seanad reform implementation group. The report group recommended that the Taoiseach bring forward the Bill in the Dáil. I dug out the letter from the chairperson of the group, Senator McDowell, to the then Taoiseach, which accompanied the report on its delivery to the Department of the Taoiseach. The chairperson stated he believed "the Bill should be introduced to Dáil Éireann rather than into the Seanad and that reform of the Seanad is not a matter best left to the initiative of the unreformed Seanad but is a matter on which the will of the people, as expressed through the Dáil, should be ascertained and implemented".

I want to make two final points concerning the Bill.