Sir, – Where Tomás Heneghan (Letters, January 9th) refers to 1,165 individuals holding votes to elect 43 seats of the Seanad, it ought to be clarified that these votes are only granted to these individuals on the premise of being elected politicians. These politicians are therefore effectively delegate voters, where this voting power is derived directly from their mandate.
Most of the voters are councillors who derive these votes from being elected in a local election where every registered resident is entitled to vote.
In general, party councillors primarily vote for candidates from their own party, in accordance with their local mandate, and also Independent councillors typically support Independent Seanad candidates. The mix of political party and non-party senators for these 43 seats is therefore reflective of the support the general public gives respectively to political party and non-party candidates in local elections.
The struggles Mr Heneghan describes for Sinn Féin and other smaller parties in terms of their poor prospects for Seanad seats is derived from their local election results in the main. Sinn Féin’s current challenges in this respect represent an outcome from their poor local election result last summer.
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The Seanad is not intended to be a second Dáil, but as a revising chamber, similar to other countries. In the Netherlands and Belgium, as other cases in point, the Senate in those countries is also intertwined heavily with the results of local or regional elections, as in Ireland. In any Seanad reform options, the primacy of the Dáil at all times would have to be at the forefront of those considerations.
In a historical context it can be noted that the first Seanad was abolished in effect because it was considered to have frustrated the early Dáil to too much of an extent. If the Seanad as currently formulated were to obstruct, purely through politicised opposition, legislation supported by the Dáil to an undue degree, it would not be tolerated generally speaking for very long by Irish society given its indirect delegate voting system composition. However, if it were to become in effect a second Dáil chamber in its form of popular election then where there would be a pronounced clash in majority control by respective opposing political parties in each chamber this practice could in the future become more likely, precipitating some possible future periods of parliamentary instability to which this State is unaccustomed to in modern times. – Yours, etc,
Cllr JOHN KENNEDY,
(Fine Gael),
Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council Offices,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.