O'Malley challenges Bill on TCD board appointment

Mr Des O'Malley (PD, Limerick East) challenged the legality of a Bill providing for the appointment of the first outsider to the board of Trinity College.

The legislation, which is known as the Trinity College Dublin (Charters and Letters Patent Amendment), followed the Universities Act, 1997, which required the appointment of an outside representative to the TCD board.

Before it passed all stages in the Dail yesterday, Mr O'Malley claimed the deadline under the Universities Act to secure the Bill's passage through the Oireachtas had expired on June 16th. He said the Bill was improperly notified to the Oireachtas by parliamentary notice in Iris Oifigiuil on November 14th, 1997.

Mr O'Malley asserted that the Bill appeared to have little or no legal effect. The Minister for Education and Science, or his successors, would be free to disregard it, and the House was, therefore, engaged in a futile exercise.

He said the ballot of the body corporate promoting the Bill with the board of Trinity College - namely, the Provost, fellows and scholars - closed at the end of business on November 21st, 1997, and could not have been used to support the parliamentary notice of November 14th.

"The ballot which closed on November 21st was improperly conducted and a second ballot was ordered by the visitors - the chancellor and a judge of the Supreme Court - with a closing date of February 7th, 1998.

"On or before November 13th. . .the Vice-Provost opened the returned ballots. The system was an assent system. Those who approved returned their assent forms. . .Those who did not agree with the Bill did not return the assent form.

"The Vice-Provost opened the ballot envelopes some nine days before the close of the ballot. He checked the names of the respondents against the register of electors and noted the names of several non-respondents. He then e-mailed, at 17.21 on Thursday, November 13th, this information to his daughter. He asked her to seek a Yes vote from those whose names he had extracted from the electoral register.

"She, in turn, e-mailed named scholars on Monday, November 17th, at 11.40 a.m. Her covering note to the e-mail mentioned that there were several others whose e-mail addresses she did not have."

Mr O'Malley said he had found himself the subject of some vituperative comments, in the Seanad and elsewhere, because he had had the temerity to challenge some of what was going on.

"The worst sanction of all was imposed on me. A professor in the University of Dublin wrote a letter of complaint about me to the leader of my party and asked her to bring me to heel. In the course of this, he said the only construction one can put on the O'Malley move is some deeper hostility or jealousy arising from the thinking of the Tierney/ McQuaid era and their systematic attempt to downgrade and eventually abolish the college."

Mr O'Malley said he would not challenge a vote on the Bill, as he did not believe "a matter as local and relatively insignificant in public terms as the internal difficulties of Trinity College", should delay the House. However, he was dissenting from its passage.