Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I welcome this reforming legislation but I am reminded, as I have so often been, of a story. There are different versions of it but it is about the old man in Connemara. Some tourists stop the car and ask for directions to Dublin. After scratching his head, he says: "To be honest with you, I would not start from here at all." Frankly, when I look at this legislation, if it is to be called reforming legislation, a Bill that simply extends the franchise for university graduates to elect Seanadóirí to include other institutes of higher education is not really the reform of Seanad elections that we need. When the referendum to abolish the Seanad failed, it was taken to mean that the people voted to keep the Seanad but they wanted it reformed. We would all agree with that. Somewhere then, the idea went about in the ether or in the imaginary that because we had one referendum, we could not have another. That is nonsense. Proper reform of the Seanad, both in how it is elected and in respect of its functions, would necessarily require the joint approach of a constitutional referendum, to recast the way the Seanad is elected in a way that is not unwieldy, and legislation that would implement it. That is not happening here. The Government is taking a minimalist approach within a minimalist approach by simply seeking to reform the way the university Seanadóirí are elected, and that only because it has been pressured into doing so by a Supreme Court judgment.

The Seanad needs to be reformed in terms of its purpose, how it operates and its scope, and in terms of how it is elected. We saw this year, in the intervention of a number of Senators, including myself, on the controversial referendum proposals from the Government and on the hate speech legislation, the vital role the Seanad can play in asking questions and bringing to public attention problems with legislation and Government policy that were not fully ventilated in the Dáil. If there was ever a year when the Seanad proved its worth, this was it. It is to the credit of Senator Chambers on the Government side that she also enabled the possibility for full and thorough scrutiny of that controversial legislation colloquially referred to as the hate speech legislation, showing that is was not just a group of Independents. That was the Seanad at its best, in my view. For it to continue to do that kind of work, we would need to see much less emphasis on the party Whip system. Since the Seanad cannot ultimately frustrate the Dáil's intent anyway, and can only delay legislation, there is no reason there would not be a culture where Senators on all sides were fully free to critique, think about, muse, reflect on, propose and vote for amendments to legislation, not on the basis of party diktat but on the basis of whether the ideas being proposed were good or not. I would like to see that reform spirit more present than it is now.

On how the Seanad is elected, I freely admit and have always said that I do not think it is a good idea in this day and age that graduates would have access to votes that citizens without degrees do not. I think of my own mother and my late father, who went to college, and many other people who had so many good ideas about policy and legislation but were simply deprived of a vote because they were neither elected representatives nor university graduates. That is anachronistic. There is all sorts of bogus modernisation going on around here, but if we were serious about modernisation it would be a good idea to adopt the principle that every citizen should have a vote for the Seanad. Anything else is a disgrace.

I have been proposing for years that it would be a good idea to elect the Seanad by way of a list system. Citizens all over the country could vote for the party or group which represents the ideas that they want and the seats would then be divvied out proportionally. It would be an open list system so that people voting for the Fianna Fáil group, the Labour group, the Christian democrat group or whatever could nominate within that list whom they wanted to get the seat if there was a seat to be got.