SENATORS’ PAY should be reduced from more than €65,000 to about €20,000 and they could be disqualified from contesting Dáil elections, according to former minister for justice Michael McDowell.
He said the Government’s argument for abolishing the Seanad on cost grounds was “bogus”.
Mr McDowell’s remarks follow Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s confirmation, while outlining cost-saving measures in his state of the nation address on Sunday night, that a referendum to abolish the Seanad would be held next year.
“If the view is that the Seanad costs too much, why not simply cut back the amount we pay Senators to such levels? The ‘cost’ argument for abolishing the Seanad is, I think, a bogus argument given that we could easily cut the cost without abolition,” he said.
Salaries for Senators should be reduced to “a much lower level, maybe in the region of €20,000 per annum”, he said. Senators currently earn a basic salary of €65,621. “Most members of a reformed Seanad, if they represented different interests in Irish society, would be honoured by the fact of their election, and few would want to be full-time politicians or to be remunerated as if they were,” Mr McDowell said.
Consideration should be given to “disqualifying members of Seanad Éireann from candidacy or election to Dáil Éireann at the general election following their membership of Seanad Éireann”, he added.
In remarks prepared for an address to the Trinity College Law Review conference last night, Mr McDowell conceded he had been wrong when he proposed the abolition of the Seanad in the 1980s, when he described it a “a cross between a political convalescent home and a creche”.
He said he had declined “on a couple of occasions” to be considered for nomination to the Upper House. “While I do not in any way regret declining such proposals, I nonetheless feel that I have now reached the point in which I should admit that on reflection I no longer believe that it would be wise or beneficial to amend our Constitution to dispense with Seanad Éireann.” The Seanad provided safeguards against the “abuse of crude power by a temporary majority in the Dáil”, he said.
“Bluntly put, if Seanad Éireann were abolished, there would be very little standing in the way of a huge transient majority in Dáil Éireann acting in a manner which had very far-reaching effects on the nature and quality of Irish democracy.”
Turning to Dáil elections, he suggested increasing the size of constituencies to six-, seven-, eight- or nine-seaters “in which it would be very difficult to create a support base based on simple clientelism”. However, he said politicians behaved in the way they were encouraged to by their voters.
