The Labour Party has proposed a radical shake-up in the manner in which university senators are elected, including the extension of the Seanad vote to all third-level students over 18, in a Private Member's Bill tabled by the former party leader, Dick Spring.
But the move has been criticised by independent Dublin University senator Shane Ross, who says it is a piece of "blatant pandering" designed to silence independent voices in the Seanad and increase Seanad representation for the major political parties, including Labour.
At present, students are not allowed to vote in Seanad elections, voting rights being limited to graduates. TCD elects its own senators, while the NUI universities are considered a separate constituency and also elect their own senators. There are currently six university senators: David Norris, Shane Ross and Mary Henry, elected by the Trinity constituency, and Feargal Quinn, Brendan Ryan and Joe O'Toole, elected by the NUI constituency.
Neither DCU nor UL currently has voting rights in Seanad elections, an omission which has been a matter of some discontent ever since the former NIHEs were granted university status. The RTCs and the DIT are similarly without a franchise.
The Seventh Amendment of the Constitution Act 1979 allowed for the introduction of legislation which would extend Seanad representation to new universities and to other higher education institutions. Since then, both DCU and UL have come into existence and the importance of the RTCs and the DIT in higher education has increased.
Under Dick Spring's Seanad Electoral (Higher Education) Bill, 1997, it is proposed that all university graduates and all graduates of other third-level institutions who have been awarded degrees by the NCEA will be permitted to vote in Seanad elections. In addition, students and employees of third-level institutions who are over 18 will also be entitled to register to vote in Seanad elections for the first time.
The Bill also proposes to eliminate the current system of separate university constituencies and instead to group them together as one constituency from which six members of Seanad Eireann will be elected.
The Bill has been welcomed by USI. USI education officer Malcolm Byrne says he believes the Bill should be supported, although he says that it could present administrative difficulties.
But Shane Ross questions the motivation behind the tabling of the Bill. "My worry about it is that the constituency will be so wide - over 200,000 people - that Labour and the other parties will regard it as fair pickings and there will be no independent senators at all," he says. He says that only large parties could afford to circulate 200,000 voters and that the effect of the Bill coming into law would be "to silence the independent voices in the Seanad".
Ross says he agrees that it is unfair that certain people in the third-level sector should have votes while others have none, but he believes the issue could be better addressed by smaller constituencies, including new constituencies for UL, DCU and the RTC/DIT sector. He also believes that other areas of the Seanad also need to be examined, including the role of county councils in electing senators, but that the independent voice in the Seanad should be protected.
"The independent voice in the Seanad has been the strongest and most vocal voice over all the years that I have been there," he says. "It has produced people of such calibre - David Norris, Mary Robinson, Conor Cruise O'Brien, John A Murphy - such non-partisan and fearless calibre, and has entered areas where political parties would not tread. "All the great liberal issues have been raised by the Trinity and NUI senators."
Senator Joe O'Toole says Ross is "whingeing about being thrust into a pluralist Ireland". O'Toole says he supports the Bill's thrust, though he says there may be constitutional difficulties in giving students a vote. He has "no difficulty" with the larger constituency, O'Toole says, "despite the fact that a number of Trinity senators have difficulty with being thrust into the big, bad political world".
