Sir, – A year ago this weekend, the Supreme Court found the law governing who can vote in elections for Seanad Éireann – in place since 1937 – to be incompatible with the Constitution.
It’s been 12 months since the highest court in the land told the Government that it had to act urgently to expand the Seanad franchise beyond just graduates of Trinity College and the National University of Ireland. Yet the Cabinet has only just been presented with a general scheme of the Seanad Electoral (University Members)(Amendment) Bill 2024.
The Government’s proposed legislation is likely to be quite simple, only about a dozen pages long, and largely mirroring the many previous Bills proposed by Government and Opposition to expand the Seanad franchise to more graduates. And this, it seems, has taken 12 whole months to simply create a broad outline for.
The Supreme Court decision last year presented the Government with the perfect opportunity to finally expand the right to vote in Seanad elections to everyone, as proposed in 2015 and 2018. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have, in their wisdom, instead decided to do the bare minimum, and at a glacial pace.
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Last week saw we saw the clear outworkings of the Government’s decision to withhold Seanad voting rights from the people of Ireland, when just over 200 politicians across Government and Opposition united to gift the Government another seat in the Seanad without any electoral contest.
I had presented myself as a willing and enthusiastic candidate for the Seanad byelection, and presented many ideas on what I would bring to the Seanad. I was met with a wall of silence from our political parties and most Independents. This left me – as the only one pursuing an election – unable to even contest the byelection, with four signatures out of the required nine, these being Independent Senators Alice Mary Higgins, Frances Black, Eileen Flynn and Lynn Ruane.
How is it that just 218 people not only determine who gets to sit in our national parliament, but whether an election is even allowed to be held?
Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, new legislation on the Seanad electorate must be place by the end of May 2025. The question for both the Government and Opposition is will they support the Government’s proposed legislation limiting the right to vote to graduates of third-level institutions, or will they stand up for democracy and demand better? Will they demand the very basic element of a democracy – one person, one vote? – Yours, etc,
TOMÁS HENEGHAN,
East Wall,
Dublin 3.