This week sees elections to Seanad Éireann, the Irish Senate, following elections to Dáil Éireann, the more powerful lower house of the Oireachtas or parliament. Unlike other elected upper houses, and indeed its predecessor, the Seanad in the Irish Free State, it is elected completely in tandem with the lower house, and in its entirety, so when the Dáil is dissolved, so too is the Seanad.
Senators are a mix of indirectly elected and nominated members, 43 chosen by TDs (Teachtaí Dála or Dáil Deputies), local councillors and outgoing Senators, to represent five vocational panels, Administrative, Agricultural, Cultural and Educational, Industrial and Commercial, and Labour, having been nominated by organisations registered for that purpose, while 6 are elected from university constituencies, graduates of the National University of Ireland and Dublin University (Trinity College Dublin) electing 3 each and 11 nominated by the Taoiseach, or prime minister.
The vocational panel system was devised by Éamon De Valera, the architect of the 1937 Constitution, and inspired by Catholic teaching. On paper, it sounds quite attractive as a model for a reformed House of Lords (or Senate) in the UK, drawing upon various sources of professional expertise, but in practice, election to the Seanad has often been used as a consolation prize for those who have lost a seat in the Dáil, before trying to get back into it, or those unable to get elected to it first time around, making the Seanad more of an ante chamber than an upper chamber.
On a side note, the party De Valera founded, Fianna Fáil, is now the sister party of the Liberal Democrats in Liberal International, despite the former historically having been socially more conservative, though De Valera got on well enough with Lloyd George, the pair able to compare their respective Celtic languages; in Irish, ‘seanad’ means ‘senate’ in the sense of ‘second chamber’, but in Welsh, ‘senedd’ means ‘parliament’, preserving the original general Latin meaning of ‘senatus’.
Across the border, the Senate in the old Northern Ireland Parliament was elected by its House of Commons, with many members holding hereditary peerages or later acquiring them, but was even weaker than its counterpart at Leinster House, and all devolved legislatures at Stormont have been unicameral since. As for the House of Commons there, while it was initially elected by the single transferable vote, Unionists later scrapped this, gerrymandering constituencies, and only abolishing the Queen’s University Belfast constituency and property vote in 1969, 19 years after Westminster.
Talking of university constituencies, this Seanad election is significant as it will be the last one in which Senators will be elected from them; at the next election, there will be a new six-member Higher Education constituency, for which any Irish citizen with a tertiary education qualification will be eligible to vote or stand, if not less elitist, then at least less of an anachronism.
The basic theory is that Europe has shortages of labour and natural resources alongside an inward migration challenge, largely across the Mediterranean, but is relatively rich and well placed with investment resources. Africa conversely has an excess of available labour and copious natural resources, but a severe shortage of capital for investment. The African perspective is that Europe is a far better fit for economic partnership than China, as China also has excess labour and is more interested in importing African raw materials than the possibility of adding value in Africa. Europe is also much closer geographically and culturally. The Africans all stress that they do not want to replace Chinese investment, but to more than match it with investment from Europe.
The first day was dominated by the elections to the ALDE Bureau, with the election of a new President and six new Vice Presidents. German MEP Svenja Hahn was the only candidate for the Presidency. She’s known to many Liberal Democrats as a former President of the youth movement, LYMEC, and spoke to the delegates of her love for the UK having spent some time working in St. Albans. Our own Sal Brinton was one of the candidates for the Vice Presidency. The results will be declared tomorrow morning.
The main Congress kicked off with speeches from current ALDE Presidents Timmy Dooley from Ireland and Ilhan Kyuchyuk from Bulgaria, who provided a thorough report on the activities of the past year. They talked about the recent elections which returned a much smaller Liberal group in the European Parliament. Unsurprisingly, a further theme of their address was the ongoing war in Ukraine. Their focus was on the crucial support provided by ALDE members to Ukraine in its fight for sovereignty and democracy. The pair underscored the importance of continued aid and diplomatic backing for the Ukrainian people in the face of Russia’s aggression.
There’s always something to distract you during a General Election campaign. And, in my case, that’s the ALDE Party Council meeting that will take place on Saturday in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. Yes, we’ll be sending a full delegation, albeit with an element of substitution, including a guest Baroness, but flights have been rearranged to keep absences as short as possible.
The long-awaited (albeit nervously) US Presidential campaign gets underway in earnest today, with the Iowa caucuses, the first step in a winnowing process that formally ends in the US Virgin Islands on 8 June. It’s only the Republicans who are taking part this week, as the Iowa Democratic primary takes place on “Super Tuesday”, 5 March. There are 40 delegates up for grabs (out of 2,467 available overall) but it isn’t winner takes all – delegates are allocated according to the share of the vote achieved. So, what are we watching out for?
One regular event is entitled the Liberal Mayors Summit, and despite the poor attendance of Mayors and Group Leaders from the UK ,even when we were in the EU, I’ve fortunately managed to sneak in on a couple of occasions. There were about 20 attending this year, from metropolitan areas across the EU, with representation from well-known cities like Warsaw, Stockholm, St Omer, Bucharest, Split, Budapest, Vienna and smaller less well-known ones from across the EU states. It was good to realise that the Liberal influence is present in so many local authority areas.
The main guest was the very popular Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President of the European Commission who had delivered a speech about plans to regulate IA.
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