Not many people know it, but a general election campaign is in full spate. Some 118 candidates are on what is known in the business as
"the Seanad trail", sprinting up and down the country seeking the votes of councillors, newly elected TDs and outgoing senators. The hands of those seeking the votes of certain university graduates are suffering atrophy.
This is a complex show, the election to the 60-seat Upper House.
As former Senator Des Hanafin can testify, it is possible to lose one's seat by less than half a vote. The Taoiseach appoints 11 of the 60 senators, a device constructed by De Valera to allow the government of the day an inbuilt majority. Between 1933 and 1936, De
Valera found he was repeatedly thwarted by a Seanad that was blocking legislation; under the 1937 Constitution, he included the concept of the "Taoiseach's Eleven".
Of the remaining 49 senators, three are elected by the National
University of Ireland and three by the University of Dublin. The other 43 are selected from five panels of candidates and elected by county councillors, members of the five city boroughs - Dublin,
Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Galway - as well as the incoming Dail and the outgoing Seanad.
These panels were also designed in the 1937 Constitution to represent the "vocational interests" of Irish society. They are:
Labour (11 seats); Agricultural (11 seats); Industrial and Commercial
(nine seats); Administrative (seven seats); Cultural and Educational
(five seats).
Candidates are nominated by a huge range of bodies, including, for example, the Royal Irish Academy of Music, the Irish Georgian
Society, Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann, the Irish Congress of Trade
Unions, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, the Irish Dental
Association . . . the list goes on. Some can be nominated by a group of four members of the Oireachtas. If the minimum number required for each panel is not reached, the Taoiseach must, in law, nominate the balance.
Each of the 992 voters is provided with five ballot papers by registered post - one for each of the panels - and all ballot papers must be returned by registered post by 11 a.m. on Wednesday, August
6th. The members of the new Seanad should be known by the following
Friday afternoon. The Taoiseach's Eleven will be named shortly afterwards.
The universities' electorate is much bigger - more than 100,000 -
and each candidate for these constituencies is nominated in writing by two registered electors as proposer and seconder and by eight supporters. Every Irish citizen who has received a degree - other than an honorary one - in the university concerned, has a right to register as an elector. Originally, the Seanad was meant to be a complement to the Dail, to provide a checks and balances and to as a buffer against possible excesses of the Lower House. In fact, nominating bodies well know that, in order to have their needs best represented in the Oireachtas, it is sensible to propose an active politician, preferably from the party political process. As a result, the Seanad is not the "vocational" assembly it was intended to be, but a political one. It is also used by ousted TDs as a relaunch pad for a career back in the Dail after the next general election and many a would-be deputy inhales his/her first gulp of Oireachtas air in the Upper House.
Now, at the conclusion of the 20th Seanad, the number of sitting members is 49. Sixteen were elected to the Dail in the last general election. Five of the 16 elected were Taoiseach nominees and the vacancies were filled by the outgoing Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, before he left office.
Fianna Fail has 17 seats; Fine Gael, 12; Labour, nine; Progressive
Democrats, two; Democratic Left, two; Independents, six; Others, one.
The outgoing Seanad will be remembered for the unusual fact that the government did not have a majority, for the first time since the re-formation of the House in the 1937 Constitution. The nominees of the former Taoiseach, Mr Reynolds, prevented the Rainbow from holding a majority. Mr Reynolds's choices had been nominated for a full Dail term and although he and his government did not survive beyond midterm, they endured. As a result, the Independent Senators had their finest hour, holding the balance of power and wielding an authority they never expected. It was for this reason that the
Rainbow coalition was forced to water down its controversial
Universities Bill. To do otherwise would have seen the Bill sink in the Seanad and be forced back to the Dail.
Extraordinarily, too, the 20th Seanad was marked by the death of two Cathaoirligh while in office. Mr Sean Fallon died after a short illness and his successor, Mr Liam Naughton, was killed in a car crash last November. A third high-profile figure, Senator Gordon
Wilson, also died suddenly.
Privately, senators complain of feeling frustrated at the lack of real power. In recent years, however, government has been initiating much more legislation in the Seanad. The former Minister of Equality and Law Reform, Mr Mervyn Taylor, initiated almost all his proposed legislation in the Seanad, including the important Civil Legal Aid
Bill.