It was described by one journalist simply as “the revenge of the Taoiseach”. The decision to merge the Seanad university panels into one giant graduate constituency will allow Mr Kenny, in one swoop, to claim credit for responding promptly to popular sentiment for Seanad reform, and to punish those university Senators implicated in the referendum defeat of his cherished abolition project. The chances of any of them being re-elected through this monstrous six-seater constituency is remote. Hoist with their own petard – revenge is sweet!
The problem is that reforming the university seats alone hardly represents the sort of profound political reform citizens are yearning for and which the political system badly needs. Any more than the abolition option did. Both the Seanad’s limited range of functions and powers and a universal franchise need to be considered seriously.
In the short term, however, the Government options are limited by the reality that to change the profoundly undemocratic franchise for Seanad elections – graduates (six seats), county councillors and nationally elected politicians (43 seats), and the Taoiseach himself (11) – would require another referendum, for which there is little appetite.
Instead the Government is opting belatedly to do what it could have done any time since 1979 when voters agreed a referendum facilitating expansion and/or merger of the two university constituencies (NUI and TCD). The result will be one constituency with an electorate expanded to include graduates from all third level colleges, likely to be several hundred thousand strong. Campaigns for this panel are likely to be expensive and risk being dominated by those who already have "star" status, or representatives of organised vested interests like teacher unions. Is this what we really need?
Not that the status quo is defensible. The strongest argument for retaining Trinity's privileged position as a nominating body was in the past it was a means of guaranteeing an Oireachtas place for representatives of the Protestant minority in a State whose ethos was predominantly and, many believed, oppressively Catholic. It had done so through a number of distinguished Protestant Senators since 1938 like Owen Sheehy Skeffington, TC Kingsmill Moore, and Bedell Stanford.
But perhaps as significantly, and hardly by design, Trinity Senate seats provided a unique platform for what once was a just-as-marginalised liberal-left perspective on Irish society whose distinguished proponents were, like most Trinity graduates now, Catholic, or Catholic gene pool, figures like Noel Browne, Conor Cruise O'Brien and Mary Robinson, to mention but a few. The case for special protection for either group is surely long gone in a society that today is largely secular in ethos, and which sees many of their ideas as mainstream.
