History shows sitting senators have a dramatic advantage in the Seanad elections
NEIL BLANEY, the late Fianna Fáil, and later Independent Fianna Fáil, TD from Donegal, is reported to have said that when a candidate is trying to predict his or her vote in an election, he or she should at least halve the number of promised first preferences.
However, he warned that given that the voters in Seanad elections are themselves professional politicians, a candidate should halve the number of promised first preferences, halve it twice more and then divide by three.
There are three key factors that determine the outcome of the Seanad election for the 43 seats on the vocational panels.
First, the outcome is shaped by party performance in the last local elections, the recent Dáil election and the last Seanad election. Each party’s seat share depends on how many city and county councillors, TDs and outgoing senators it has. The complexities about inside panels and outside panels and the influence of Independents and smaller parties can distort this a bit but it applies as a general rule.
The most significant development in this regard since 2007 has been the collapse of the Fianna Fáil vote in the electoral college. The party lost 80 seats in the 2009 city and county council elections and 58 seats in this year’s Dáil election. Fianna Fáil won 21 of the 43 seats on the vocational panels in 2007; 12 is the most they can hope for now.
Second, the extent to which a party leader can influence who wins seats for the party in Seanad elections depends on the whether he or she can control who is nominated. In 2002, by controlling who was nominated both by the Oireachtas and the nominating bodies, Fine Gael secured an overhaul of its Seanad representation. It favoured fresher, younger senators, almost all of these went on to contend for and win Dáil seats in subsequent general elections. Similarly in 2007 it was the internal selection process within the Labour parliamentary party which determined who was elected to the Seanad. The party won five Seanad seats in 2007 and four of those senators were elected in the recent Dáil election.
Micheál Martin’s inability to control who was nominated for Fianna Fáil in this election has fatally undermined his capacity to influence the party’s representatives. The other factor operating against Martin’s efforts is that the third significant determinant is incumbency. Sitting senators have a dramatic advantage.
Their primary focus for the previous four or five years is to nurse their political and personal relationship with the few hundred councillors who are their constituents. Almost all sitting senators who recontest a Seanad election on a vocational panel get re-elected. This pattern of incumbency is only broken when a TD who has lost his or her Dáil seat contests the Seanad election on that panel.
Of the five senators elected on the cultural and educational panel in 2007, two were outgoing senators, two were TDs who lost out in the 2007 election and only the Labour Party candidate Alex White was a newcomer.
Seven of the 11 senators elected on the agricultural panel were outgoing members. Four of the Fianna Fáil senators were outgoing and the fifth was the former Mayo TD John Carty. Three of the four Fine Gael members elected were outgoing. The others were Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty and Labour’s Alan Kelly.
On the 11-seat Labour panel, four of the five seats won by Fianna Fáil were won by outgoing senators. On the Fine Gael side, three of the four were new but only because their incumbents had been elected to the Dáil.
Of the 11 seats on the industrial and commercial panel, three of the four Fianna Fáil senators elected were outgoing senators, the fourth was Denis O’Donovan who had lost his Dáil seat. The only new Fianna Fáil face was Larry Butler, a long-time councillor in Dublin.
On the seven-seat administrative panel, three of the four Fianna Fáilers elected were incumbents. More strikingly, across all parties and all five panels I could only identify two outgoing senators who contested the 2007 Seanad election unsuccessfully. One was Pascal Mooney on the administrative and cultural panel who, as it happens, was subsequently returned to the House in a byelection in 2010. The other was the outgoing Fine Gael senator Fergal Browne who had by then unsuccessfully contested two Dáil elections in Carlow-Kilkenny.
Interestingly the power of incumbency is even stronger on the university panels. On the Trinity panel, Shane Ross was a senator for 30 unbroken years and David Norris has been a Senator since 1989. The third winner in 2007 Ivana Bacik was new but that gap arose only because of the retirement of Mary Henry, a senator since 1993.
On the National University of Ireland panel Joe O’Toole was a senator for 25 unbroken years and Feargal Quinn has been there since 1993. The only recent instance I could find of a sitting university panel senator losing his or her seat was Brendan Ryan, who lost out to Feargal Quinn in 1993. He won the seat back in 1997, only to lose it to Ronan Mullen in 2007.
The vagaries of Ryan’s relationship with the Labour Party and the complication of having Joe Lee as a fellow Corkonian incumbent may have contributed to this chequered Seanad electoral history.
Ryan is the exception that proves the rule. If you are in situ going into a Seanad election, you are almost certain to be in situ coming out of it.