An important election in which the majority of citizens have no vote and whose procedures are arcane and almost wilfully obscure is drawing to a close.
By this time next week most of the 49 available seats in Seanad Éireann will have been filled after a truly gruelling election campaign. A lucky few will subsequently be nominated by the Taoiseach without having to go through the ordeal and the new 60-member Upper House will be open for business.
A succession of official reports, the most recent of them commissioned by Bertie Ahern's own government, have recommended sweeping reform of the Seanad to make it more democratic but they have all been blithely ignored. It has suited the political establishment to leave things as they are because the current rules give the government of the day a stranglehold over the institution.
The brazenness of the Government's negligence is illustrated by the fact that a constitutional referendum to widen the franchise for the six university seats was passed by the people in 1979, yet no action has been taken to implement that decision. Graduates from third-level institutions outside the National University of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin still do not have the vote. Inertia about reform is one thing but flouting a decision of the people for 28 years is something else.
The current Seanad election has managed to get on the media radar because there is a possibility that the Government could actually lose control of the Upper House. This could happen despite the fact that the Constitution allows the Taoiseach to nominate 11 supporters to ensure that such an eventuality should not happen.
The Seanad has important powers under the Constitution that allow it to delay but not block legislation. In effect it means that the Government may have to negotiate deals and accept Opposition amendments in order to get its legislation through without the embarrassment of suffering Seanad defeats. The only previous occasion on which a government did not have a Seanad majority was during the period of the rainbow government of 1994 to 1997.
Because John Bruton's government did not take power following an election he was not able to nominate 11 senators but had to live with the Fianna Fáil appointees. That left the Fine Gael leader of the Seanad, Maurice Manning, with the task of getting government legislation passed by a potentially hostile majority. In the event he skilfully negotiated the passage of legislation through the Upper House and saved his government the time and effort involved in bringing Bills back to the Dáil in order to overrule defeats in the Seanad.
The reason the Government could lose control of the Seanad this time around is that Fianna Fáil had a bad local election result in 2004 and county councillors make up the bulk of the electorate for 43 of the Seanad seats. The other voters for these seats are TDs and senators and that brings the total electorate up to about 1,050 people. These seats are almost always filled by professional politicians, despite the fact that in theory the senators are supposed to represent different interest groups in society.
The gruelling nature of the election campaign for the five panels is legendary. Candidates have to traipse up and down the country knocking on the doors of county councillors looking for votes. Their own party councillors are the key target constituency but they generally canvass others as well in the hunt for vital preference votes.
Some candidates enjoy getting out and about meeting the councillors, even if the 10,000km drive around the country is wearing. Others, though, find the whole exercise an ordeal, particularly if they are defeated general election candidates, who have to put their exhaustion and disappointment aside for a last shot at making it to the national political stage.
Getting elected to the Seanad is vital for politicians on the way up who are aiming at a Dáil seat next time out. It is even more important for defeated Dáil candidates who want to keep their foot in the political door. For instance, after his defeat in the 2002 election, one of the rising stars of Fine Gael, Brian Hayes, was able to keep his political career alive by getting elected to the Seanad and he made it back to the Dáil in the recent election.
Another example was Fianna Fáil's Michael Kitt, who not only lost his Dáil seat in 2002 but failed to make it to the Seanad as well. He managed to get on the list of taoiseach's nominees to the Seanad and not only recovered his Dáil seat in the recent election but was appointed Minister of State with responsibility for Overseas Aid.
In this Seanad election all the parties have put a lot of effort into getting potential Dáil winners next time around elected. Labour and Sinn Féin have even negotiated a vote swap deal designed to give each party an extra seat. If it succeeds they will each take a seat Fianna Fáil would otherwise have won.
In the last Seanad, Fianna Fáil won 24 of the available 43 seats, Fine Gael got 15 and Labour 4. The Taoiseach nominated six more Fianna Fáil politicians and four PDs along with the Independent, Maurice Hayes. That gave the government a comfortable working majority in the Seanad, even if all six of the university senators opposed it.
This time around Fianna Fáil will probably lose three and possibly even five seats. In the worse case scenario the party will certainly be in a minority in the next Seanad as up to four of the 11 Taoiseach's nominees are promised to the Greens and the PDs. This prospect has left Fianna Fáil trying to drum up extra seats through the university panels.
The university senators have traditionally been Independent but in the last Seanad two of them were associated with the Labour Party. Brendan Ryan, who was elected on the NUI panel, took the Labour whip while Mary Henry of Trinity was a party supporter, although she did not take the whip. Fianna Fáil has attempted to counter the potential loss of seats on the five panels by endorsing two university candidates, John Hillery for NUI and Seán O'Connor for Trinity. The former is the son of a former president and the latter the grandson of a former taoiseach.
The prospect of Fianna Fáil being in a minority in the Seanad will at least make the outcome more interesting. Hopefully, it will also prompt a serious attempt to reform the institution so that it does have a wider democratic mandate and that proper electoral registers are kept by third-level institutions.
The most recent proposal on Seanad reform came as a result of a consultation process initiated by Mary O'Rourke, the outgoing leader of the House. Her report proposed scrapping the current system of vocational panels and the extension of the university vote to all third-level graduates. The major change was that 26 senators would be elected by all voters under a list-PR system to a national constituency.
Six senators would be elected to a higher education constituency at the same time, with graduates opting to vote in either the national or the higher education contest. Under the plan another 20 senators would be elected by county councillors and Oireachtas members, within 90 days of a Dáil election. A total of 12 senators, including two from Northern Ireland, would be nominated by the Taoiseach with the outgoing cathaoirleach being returned automatically.
When the proposal was made in 2004 Ms O'Rourke said the Taoiseach had agreed to appoint an implementation group under minister for the environment Martin Cullen. Of course nothing ever happened but it is something the current Minister for the Environment, John Gormley, could profitably take up now if he is serious about Oireachtas reform.