Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I too will take the same position as my colleagues and will not participate in today's election. I find it deeply regrettable that we find ourselves in this situation. We have two excellent candidates. I was not aware of Senator Flynn's emergence into the competition until this morning. I had committed to Senator Byrne, a very fine Senator and a wonderful parliamentarian; both of them excellent qualities. However, we have been thrown into this abyss because of what has happened.

I want to put something on the record. We talk here about parties; we recently went through a count for the Senate seats that we sit in, and nowhere on the ballot paper does it reflect party membership. Most of us are elected to this House because of the vocational expertise we bring to it. We are not elected to a geographical area of any sort. We do not represent any geographical area. We represent the vocational panels we have been elected to, the university panels we have been elected to, or we represent the Taoiseach, who has nominated 11 people. In 2013, before I was a Member of this House, I fought to save it when excellent people like Feargal Quinn, Michael McDowell and various others also were out there fighting to save it. There was an implicit promise that reform would come. Reform has not come. The public have been cheated.

It behoves all of us in this House to fight for the reform of the Seanad. It is an institution that should perform without party interference at any stage.We are not Dáil Members. Most of us who are here do not or should not want to be Members of the Dáil. We should want to be here in the reforming House we are in.