Fine Gael leader simply decided he needed a 'Liveline'-friendly proposal of his own, writes NOEL WHELAN
BY FAILING to reform, Seanad Éireann has rendered itself irrelevant. The Upper House is so dilapidated that it was only a matter of time before a party leader was going to call for its demolition.
Last Saturday night Enda Kenny rose to that challenge. He later spoke on RTÉ Radio One's Morning Irelandabout how he was taking a leadership decision. This was followed by much talk from others about how the Fine Gael leader was courageously taking on his parliamentary party. This suggestion did not require much bravery or leadership, however. There are very few Fine Gael parliamentarians who have a long-term vested interest in the survival of the Seanad and even those who do are wise enough to see that this proposal is extremely unlikely to see the light of day.
After its 2002 Dáil election debacle Fine Gael culled most of its career senators and put future Dáil contenders in their seats. Of the 13 Fine Gael senators elected in 2007, 10 had been candidates in that year’s Dáil election. Most of these are likely to contest for and be elected to the next Dáil.
For Kenny’s proposal to be implemented, Fine Gael would first have to get elected to government. That looks very likely. Then, however, the proposal would have to survive in a Fine Gael-Labour programme for government. That looks very unlikely. Fine Gael’s recent local electoral success means it will be the largest party in the Seanad after the next election even before Kenny appoints taoiseach’s nominees. The Labour Party would get four or five taoiseach nominees and would be unenthusiastic about foregoing these spoils. The abandonment of the proposal to abolish the Seanad – at Gilmore’s insistence, don’t you know – would get Kenny off the hook.
Even if Kenny was to ensure this abolition proposal survived in the programme for government, it would take at least a year to put it to a referendum. If it passed in a referendum, there would of course be a wind-down period before the Seanad was gone. The remaining three or four current Fine Gael career senators know therefore that they probably have at least four years from today’s date before they have to retire. They would then be entitled to pensions and maybe even further financial compensation because their term has been cut short.
Fine Gael senators rowed in behind Kenny’s proposal not because they were inspired by his leadership initiative but because they recognised that in reality it is unlikely to have any real impact on their careers.
Kenny could have shown true leadership if he had announced that, unless the Seanad was radically reformed before the next general election, Fine Gael would not stand candidates for the Upper House. That would have required real courage.
What Kenny engaged in last Saturday was a political stunt, not a programme of reform.
Panicked by public anger at politicians, outflanked by Eamon Gilmore on the O’Donoghue controversy and conscious of Government proposals for further cuts in Ministers’ pay, the Fine Gael leader decided that he needed his own Liveline-friendly proposal.
The leader of the Opposition does not carry primary responsibility for the failure to reform our political system. That rests with the Government. Apart from a few minor tweakings in local government Fianna Fáil has shown an almost complete lack of interest in improving our political system over the last 12 years.
Even reformers like Noel Dempsey, instead of focusing on effecting immediate change within the current constitutional framework, have focused instead on unrealistic proposals for grand rearrangements of the constitutional architecture. Dempsey, for example, assumes that if we could just have a Dáil where half of the deputies were elected by regional or national lists and the other half by single-seat constituencies, that would remove the clientelist pressures on our parliamentarians. However, such a change would cause more problems then it would solve because in addition to reducing proportionality it would hand the power to put or order candidates on the electoral list to party leaders or party backroom operatives and thereby diminish the power and independence of individual deputies rather than enhance it.
Put bluntly, if our politicians genuinely wished to reform the political system they could do it next week in a series of relatively straightforward rule changes and legal changes and without the need for referendums.
If they really wanted to, the chief whips could immediately agree an overhaul of Dáil procedures to improve the accountability of the executive to parliament. A loosening of the party system would allow TDs themselves to establish a smaller and more powerful Dáil committee system.
Even if the parties really wanted to transform the Seanad, it could be done by legislation extending the power to elect those on the vocational panels to ordinary voters in a national constituency. Many assume this would require a referendum but it does not. All of this reform could be buttressed by constitutional change if needs be, but in the meantime our politicians should just get on with it.