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. 

However, that franchise could have been expanded decades ago, as an amendment to the Constitution to allow for it was approved in a referendum back in 1979. It took a Supreme Court ruling to compel the government to act, after doing, as Trinity Senator David Norris inimitably put it in 2013, ‘sweet bugger all about it’! Back then, there seemed more chance of outright abolition of the Seanad, when Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny held a referendum on scrapping it, arguing that a second chamber was unnecessary in a small state, only for voters to reject it, much to his disappointment. 

On the other hand, the UK is much larger, at least in population, and while it has not become a federal state, there is a greater need for territorial interests to be represented in its parliament, but Germany, in which the 69-strong Bundesrat is made up of delegates from each state government, shows that such a body need not be large or directly elected.  

Indeed, when the Seanad was first established in the then Irish Free State, a dominion of the British Empire, it was intended to be directly elected, one third of members being elected at a time, but in the first election in 1925, voters were put off by having to rank 76 candidates in preference, most of whom they had never heard of before. How enthusiastic would voters in the UK be at that prospect in would-be senatorial elections in 2025? Mercifully, those in Australia only have to rank 12 in theirs!  

* Ken Westmoreland is a member of the Taunton and Wellington Local Party.