Saving the Seanad, not bloody likely

// May 27th, 2011 // No Comments » // GE11, Seanad, seanad eireann, seanad reform

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Once again the nation was treated this week to the sights and sounds of the returning Seanad. Not that most of the population had noticed that it had been away. Various people, most of them senators of long standing, used the occasion and the press attention to give voice to their strongly held view that the Seanad should be retained at all costs and indeed reformed to the benefit of all. Burdocks to that I say.

Let’s be straight with one another, without any concrete proposals being adopted by the Seanad itself to reform I won’t be voting or campaigning to save it as it is currently constituted, all on the promise that it might, one day, far off in the future, after it has had one more custard pie and a nice nap, be reformed in some way.

I stood as a candidate for the Seanad on the NUI panel on the basis that it must be reformed immediately or else abolished. My thoughts were and are that the time has long run out for last chances for this chamber, that it was time for things to be done or to dust with it. I’ve not changed my mind since that election took place. The last (the 12th in total) report from the Seanad itself on its reform was the usual weighty document, full of compromises ironed out amongst the senators themselves with one eye glancing back towards their past and future electorate of local authority members and a minority of 3rd level graduates. Hence the proposal to retain the election of some Senators by local authority members even while the general populous was to elect a portion of the chamber.

And we then saw how commitment to the reforms in that report as within the lifetime of the last Oireachtas various  senators from political parties and also noted independents welching and reneging on their support for even these watery set of reforms. Demanding, demanding no less, that even those small steps that could be enacted by a simple legislative process must not be touched unless the entire chamber was simultaneously reformed. This is beyond getting cats to walk in a line, it’s looking for them to do a synchronised about turn once they are all facing in the same direction.

That steadfast unwillingness to do even the bare minimum is the crux of the argument on any referendum on the abolition of the Seanad for me. I believe that abolition of the Seanad on its own is mere electoral window dressing and would represent a bad decision. Yet voting to keep the Seanad as is, in the forlorn hope that reforms might happen based on non-binding commitments post the referendum, would be a worse decision.

I will continue to poke those people I might chance to have access in the Dáil for the enactment of extensive changes to the Dáil electoral system which should happen simultaneously with the abolition of the Seanad. But I’m not going to make it a ‘do that or else’ demand. I will not campaign to save a chamber that can’t bring itself to present a real package of agreed reforms when faced with its own extinction. And these would have to be detailed reforms that it stand over, and could not and would not revoke. After all, if the members of the Seanad especially those most vocal in its defence can’t even act to pass a simple bill making those straightforward changes that could have been made by legislation then what right have they to demand that others must act save them and the chamber that they have done so much to keep the rest of the population away from. If they are not willing to act to save themselves then why should we bother?

Alternatives to lists and quotas to reduce clientelism and offer the electorate more diverse voting options

// December 30th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // 2010, Seanad, seanad eireann, seanad reform

Long form version of a post I have over on Political Reform.

Discussion about political change, and in particular where electoral reform is concerned, tends to start by identifying a problem by examining its symptoms and then seeks to alleviate those same symptoms. Often times through green-field gerrymandering that presupposes we are able to start from scratch at some future election. Such green field efforts aim for defined outcomes rather than simply ensuring the system is correct and allowing the outcomes to be in the hands of the voters. Such new systems and practices as are proposed also tend to ignore any number of real world practicalities. In this piece, I’m going to try to outline two of the problems as I see them in how the electoral system currently functions, coupled with some the practical realities that accompany them, and then suggest two forms of electoral change that would actually address those problems without seeking to ensure some particular outcome. Neither of the suggested systems would perfectly address the core problems I will be addressing but they would do so sufficiently to ensure that we can move on in our discussions to some of the other problems we face.

Two of biggest problems – and from which almost all others stem – are a lack of real diversity being offered to the electorate in our parliamentary and local administrative elections and a surfeit of clientelism. I will start with the latter.

1)      Clientelism

Excessive clientelism across Irish political life is a real problem we have to face up to. However, we need to recognise that clientelism is not simply the result of the PR-STV system but is rather a potentiality that exists in all electoral systems if the electorate are so minded to reward it. Other nations and local governmental units overseas have taken measures to prevent it getting out of control. It is therefore a situation that needs to be controlled and managed, not necessarily eliminated entirely as it originates from the behaviour of the public. In considering what those measures might involve in particular in the context of our local political environment here in Ireland, we need to consider the scale of clientelism and how it works in Ireland. I will confine myself initially with clientelism at the Dail level but the suggested solution outlined later could work with some modifications for local administration elections too.

Clientelism as a major problem manifests itself when it is possible to get elected from simply doing stuff particular to the everyday needs of individual voters or their families (letter writing, form filling, hand holding, funeral attending, and making calls for people) on a purely local level – the direct person to person contact – such that a sufficient number of people will reward you with a vote such that you can be elected on this support base alone. It is, in some senses, a transactional issue; you are buying votes for work done for those specific individuals who will in turn cast their ballots for you. In Irish elections, you are well in the running for a seat in most general elections if you poll over 6,000 first preference votes and are almost guaranteed one if you poll over 8,000. It is actually possible given the nature of Ireland to physically meet that many people and do that many small things and be rewarded by their extended families and communities over the course of the 3/5 year period that occurs between elections. Worse yet, you can be elected with considerably less than that level of support to the local council and with the winning of a council seat becoming more and more a required stepping stone to the Oireachtas (national parliament encompassing both the Dáil and Seanad) then only those who have won at local election level get to be in the running for a Dail  nomination.

What we are presented with is a straight forward problem of scaling; make it sufficiently hard to get in the running for a seat in the Dail simply on clientelism activities alone and you will reduce the impact of clientelism on the governance of the country. Most see the solutions to this as involving some large scale reduction in the numbers of seats so as to ensure higher quotas. This would act as a means to raise the bar sufficiently that you would need too large a number of votes say 20,000 or so or they seek to remove the link between locality and national representation via various list systems. Yet a parliament consisting of only 80 or so members (which is what decreasing the number of seats to increase the quotas to around 20,000 would mean) makes for its own problems in ensuring a deep enough pool from which to draw an executive while leaving enough legislators available. A government of 15/20 members drawn from only 40 or so representatives of the majority party would be a recipe for disaster, almost everyone who had been elected more than once would have to serve in cabinet. Doing less than this by reducing the Dail by much smaller amounts of say only 20 to 30 TDS would do next to nothing to affect clientelism as what is required is to increase the quotas by several orders of magnitude.

List systems of various types  are also suggested as a possible solution to the problem of clientelism but lists too bring with them their own set of new problems. It is unclear just who is going to decide who is on the list, and where they are placed and how people get well enough known nationally to get votes and how exactly that would all be funded. When people say that list systems would be controlled by the political parties it is never made clear who exactly in the parties they mean, the membership, local or national, the party executives, professionals who work for the party, the elected party leadership. People often talk of ‘the political parties’ as if they were sentient entities in their own right which shows up that many of those suggesting we should have national lists controlled by the parties have limited knowledge exactly how political parties operate at the senior level. Because – believe me – it won’t necessarily lead to any broadening of the general diversity of the candidates on offer to have the party hierarchy in charge of who gets on lists and what placement they are given.

So how might we go about requiring that you need considerably more votes than can be delivered through clientelism but not need to dangerously reduce the numbers of parliamentary seats? One solution that would require someone to get considerably more votes to get elected is to have multi-vote overlapping geographical and non-geographically based constituencies. We’re familiar with the concept of panel elections from the Seanad even if they operate on a much too restrictive franchise of local authority members and existing Oireachtas members. The idea is that each voter would have 4 (it could be 3 or 5, I’m not married to 4) votes to cast in 4 overlapping constituencies that would each be electing only a quarter of the number of TD per head as now. However, since there would be 4 of them we’d still end up with the same number of TDs only the quota would be increased by a factor of 4 without incurring the problems associated with having too small a parliament.

So we could have a West of Ireland constituency with 8 seats representing all the counties of the western seaboard with an electorate of 300,000 that also overlaps in places with a Munster constituency that has 10 seats and a 4 seat Southern constituency including part of Kerry, all of Cork and Waterford and a part of Wexford. We could have 3 and 4 seat constituencies for fishing, the Gaeltacht and other non-geographic profession or special interest constituencies based on other criteria. People in Louth could vote in North Leinster, East Leinster and the Border. It would be possible then for the quotas to be three and four times what they are now while retaining roughly same overall number of elected representatives as at present. In such a scenario with non-geographical constituencies (that could be made to dynamically grow as more people chose to exercise their votes for those panels rather than the geographical) we could look to eliminate the Seanad.

With no one being able to get elected just by being the main Killarney candidate or the sole candidate from Dingle, they would have to offer more in the way of a broader policy message for the country and to people spread across such distances that they can’t spend as much time being clientelist agents for. It would not end clientelism forever but it would reduce it considerably.

2)      Diversity and Broadening choice at election time.

There is considerable attention given to the lack of diversity in the Oireachtas which derives entirely from the lack of diversity is offered to the electorate. For many reasons, understandable but misguided, most of the attention is on purely the topic of gender diversity with the occasional nod towards the age profile of the parliament.

The truth is that lack of diversity in representative politics is not simply gender specific but encompasses age, income, educational background, and shocking though it might be for some to consider, political opinion. To focus solely on gender is to miss the core problem which is that it is the voters that cause the political parties to tack to the middle and safe, conservative waters in terms of candidate selection. Our parliament should no more have a minimum target for female or male representation any more than it would have a maximum one.

The question is often asked why don’t political parties run more women, more young people, more people who are gay, more openly ideologically opinionated people both left and right leaning, more people who like mountain biking or Aphex Twin (ok that’s probably just me). Yet the question is often asked more as a rhetorical device to castigate political party X or position Y instead of looking at the reality of why parties don’t run broader slates of candidates.

So why do parties cleave to the mainstream with their tickets? The truth is because they are ruled more by fear than adventure, and because most of them have seats that they can lose as much as they are targeting seats that they can win. Political party organisations as campaigning entities exist in the main to win seats, and winning seats is again about numbers and the behaviour of the electorate. You can design new electoral systems all you want but if the public want to vote a certain way or use the system to get a certain outcome then that is what they will do and that is what they will try to get. In part the problem in Ireland is that winning seats, not alone above all but to the exclusion of all else, has been become the sole objective of the party organisations.

So what is stopping parties running much more diverse slates, why not run 7 candidates in a 5 seater? Fundamentally it is down to transfers, you might think that running as broad a range of candidates would be the best option as it would ensure that everyone in an area has a candidate from a party whose policies they like that and who – on a personal leve – they are also comfortable voting for. With our form of geographically based PR-STV that is not what happens, e.g. the Killorglin FFer leaks votes to the FGer from Killorglin costing FF a 2^nd Kerry South seat that they should have won based on their share of the 1st preference vote. Even FF who used to run as many candidates as there were seats learned in the end that with PR-STV you will lose seats you would have won by running too many candidates as the transfers ebb away over the course of the counts.

Quotas that require a gender divide in candidate slates would be more damaging to those larger parties that might be able to think about win more than one seat in a constituency. They are also wholly unnecessary to achieve the aim of broadening access.  Requiring a party that might typically run 3 candidates in a 5 seater because they can win 2 seats to instead run 4 of which half must be of one gender are being targeted compared to the party that is just in the hunt for just one seat that will simply run their usual main candidate along with a token. It would lead to the smaller parties especially running complete token candidates, I’m sure that Joe Higgins and Clare Daly would find compliant running mates of the required gender whose name might be on the ballot but who won’t campaign worth a damn. And it is a measure that doesn’t apply to independent/non party or single issue candidates at all!

If we were to have quotas at all then it would be more reasonable to require all parties contesting the election to offer a panel of candidates equal to double the number of seats with an equal man/female split in others words to have what would be local lists. Some people will not unreasonably say this will hurt the smaller parties more that are in the running for more one seat in a 4 seater or that it would lead to tokenism. Yet so would the notion that we must run 50/50 tickets, but it is a valid criticism of local lists then it is a valid criticism of unequally weighted gender splits.

The suggestion I would make is that we could take one of the positive facets of a national list and say that the total allocation of parliamentary seats for each party is to be based on the national % of the 1^st preference vote the party secures, provided that some minimal threshold of 3/4/5% is reached. We could then proceed to elect 75/80% of the Dail in the manner we are used to with uniformly sized constituencies of 4 seats. Let’s say we have thirty constituencies of 4 seats each giving us 120 TDs in this manner. Yes they will straddle county boundaries and the like but what of it, the county system as a unit of local administration/governance is past its sale by date but that’s a post for another time. We could even have some portion of those 4 seat constituencies be non-geographically based, incorporating the reforms suggested in the first part of this piece to increase the quotas!

The first major change we will see is that parties will run broader slates as every last 1^st preferences counts for the same in getting their national seat totals! Running that smart female lecturer from Milltown who works in Tralee is no longer a problem even if the sitting male FF TD is based 4 miles away in Killorglin, they can run candidates in every town they want if they like (and if they have the money to do so). Her potential value to the party isn’t reduced as the eliminations take place; and the people still get to decide who is best placed to be elected first. Her extra votes are not progressively discounted by the elimination and transfer stages at the count. So imagine an election where the national vote percentages were FG 30% FF 20% Lab 25% SF 15% Green 5% Others 5% And the result when all the four seats are filled in all the constituencies were 120 – FG 40 FF 25 Lab 31 SF 17 Green 3 Others 2

With 30 to be distributed as mop-ups with the aim is to have a proportionate chamber of 150 the target to be aimed for is

150 seats – FG 46 FF 31 Lab 38 SF 22 Green 10 Others 2

The mop up or top up, overhang is performed by deeming those whose parties had sufficient national support to warrant election for more seats but it is not party hierarchies that are picking insider favourites to fill those slots, it is the people.  Very strong independents could continue to be elected by some areas as at present though there would not be an ‘independent’ list or top up element.

With the first allocations to be made to the smaller parties and a gap of 7 seats for the Greens they would get their 7 candidates who had ended up unelected in the order of those who had gotten the most votes around the country. So the constituency with the highest polling Green candidate at the end of the count process would have that Green candidate being deemed to be elected as a top/mop up overhang representative. They would still have to have run candidates who were from somewhere and the choice still remains with the electorate not the party hierarchy as to who is elected. And the parties have been given an incentive to run broad slates.

A counter argument might be advanced that party X might still not pick enough women but if that were the case and if the electorate (who are 50% female after all) care enough about gender alone and party Y runs more women then it is party Y not party X would benefit. The aim of this system is to break down barriers, to encourage more diversity – what happens after that is in the hands of the prospective candidates and the electorate.

In summary, we have real problems in our politics as a result of excessive clientelism and a lack of diversity at election time but we need to consider how any systemic changes being suggested would work in the actual environment that exists in Ireland. Too much discussion is based on laboratory conditions or what happens elsewhere under entirely different electoral systems. We need to recognise that encouraging much more choice is better in the long run than seeking to restrict choice and that our ties to purely geographically based representation is blinding us to inventive but practical options that might assist us to combating clientelism.

Does Ivor Callely own any property at all?

// July 14th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Yesterday Sen Callely said in respect of the property in West Cork that he was claiming allowances and mileage from that “I have a right to reside in west Cork but it’s not in my ownership.” This was in response to questioning from Sen. Joe O’Toole who asked if he owned the property in west Cork. So he has the right to live there but he does not own it. Ivor Callely has also repeatedly alluded to personal family conditions that make his being totally transparent about his living situation more difficult.

So it is beginning to look like Ivor, at some point in the recent past, might have been too clever by half and that all “his” property is not in his name at all but rather it is in his wife’s or other family members names and that this might be the cause of some difficulty for him in establishing what is and is not his principal residence. Cos he might well own nothing and have no rental agreement with anyone and thus not be able to prove that he in fact lives or has a principal residence anywhere. Just why, you might ask, would someone transfer ownership of their assets to others? Well, one situation in which it would make sense was if you were a public representative and wanted to avoid declaring these interests in the declaration of members interests. Did Ivor Callely do this? I don’t know and I’m not going to say he did this.

It is also worth noting that “Mr Callely told the committee the house in west Cork had been for sale since “04/05-ish”. He said he had never denied it was for sale and insisted he would not benefit, in terms of capital gains tax liability, if it was sold.” So he won’t benefit from it at all, again seeming to mean he does not own it or have a financial interest in it. But this begs the questions did he ever own it and if he did when and why did he transfer the ownership.

Now let’s review someone else whose family situation meant they couldn’t be 100% clear with the public about their finances, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Bertie had a legal separation agreement with his wife and the terms and details of this could not be made public. This meant we, the taxpayers and as voters his employers,  couldn’t find out exactly what he owned and when he got it or what he transferred to her and his children once the separation was agreed. All very inconvenient the Taoiseach told us as it might he couldn’t be completely transparent with us the voters though he really really wanted to be.

One other thing which is probably entirely unrelated, as we were assured that the former Taoiseach was a God fearing man and didn’t hold with this sort of thing, is the provisions of divorce law in Ireland. These say you might, in order to file for divorce, need to show that you had been legally separated from your spouse for or living apart for a number of years before a divorce might be granted. I’m not sure if this legal agreement needs to actually be publicly available or acknowledged once it is drawn up all proper and legal like and is agreeable to both parties. So such an agreement might exist and we the public would be none the wiser.

One can imagine the situation and in truth rather untenable legal position that a person might hypothetically find themselves in if say they had transferred all their property to their spouse for some reason or other and were years later to find themselves because of changed personal circumstances agreeing a separation agreement with their spouse. After all, once their spouse’s name was on the property they couldn’t legally argue that it was meant to be still their property really. It’s like something out of a badly plotted rom-com.

But back to Ivor, and away from these hypothetical and entirely unconnected people, he continues to defend himself before the Seanad committee who are it seems are bullying him, just like some other people were bullying Sen. Mullen last week. To add insult to injury it turns out the state is fronting Ivor €50 to turn up to an investigation into his circumstances. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

An open letter on Seanad Reform

// October 21st, 2009 // 8 Comments » // enda kenny, fine gael, Seanad, seanad eireann, seanad reform

The proposal that Fine Gael policy should be to abolish the Seanad after the next election as announced by the party leader Enda Kenny leaves me in two minds. As a means to put down a marker to the government and the Seanad more generally that reform of politics must happen now or else, it is without equal. This reform can start this side of Christmas by extending the franchise beyond TCD and the NUI by legislation, and with notice of a referendum on wider reform to be put before the people by the time of the next summer recess. The choice is now very stark: reform or die.

I am quite sure that this idea will have widespread popular support amongst the public. Yet the mere popularity of an idea is no reflection on its merit. Though I understand and indeed share in the view that the charade of reform has gone on too long, I also believe that a genuine case can be made for the need for bicameral system given the enormously local focus that the current electoral system forces upon TDs. That is the work that TDs do and must do in order to be elected, and a reduction from 166 to 124 in the number elected in this way will not shift the burden sufficiently to allow major change to occur.

We should be in no doubt; the general public are debating ideas considerably more unthinkable than the mere abolition of the Seanad. If such debate continues to occur in places ignored or unheard by party politics then it will be to the detriment of us all. For the moment I would ask that the policy should be one of reform now or die, rather than die now. For that reason, I would ask that the policy to be adopted be with the proviso that it would be reviewed should substantive political reform be implemented prior to the next general election. We should say that we are planning to act but if the government were to implement, not simply announce or propose or set up a commission or look for another report, but actually implement reforms that will match the parameters of cost reduction, increased powers of scrutiny and compellability for committees as outlined over the last few days then we would be prepared to give it the chance to work. This has the advantage of throwing the focus back onto the lack of action by all the government parties and also sets an immediate clock ticking on the issue with concrete milestones that all the issue to be revisited to our advantage. If there is no move on the university seats by Christmas say then it becomes topical again, if there is no bill and referendum by the summer recess then the same. We can keep the pressure on the government at each step. Let us accept that the Seanad is now drinking in the last chance saloon but we should not be so rude as to eject it before it has finished its drink and had the chance to demonstrate, really demonstrate that it can change.

Yet as someone who stood independently for the Seanad in 2007 in large part on the issue of reform, I am minded that party members of all major Irish political parties have no substantive input into the formulation of party policy. Ard Fheiseanna of all hues have long passed into the realm of mere staged managed speaking and photo opportunities for election candidates. A process colluded in by the media who hype up the merest prospect of any real debate as a sign of in-fighting and division instead of the sign of vibrancy it really is. While a leader should and must have the right to initiate policy ‘on the hoof’ in reaction to events, no events have occurred in the last week requiring such a policy shift.

Now more than ever, we need politics to be a genuine battleground of ideas, new and, if long neglected, old. These ideas must be examined, debated, tested and contested at every step. Political parties exist because they are a means to reflect and express the collective views of their members, from the person at the branch level to the highest of our public representatives. After all, it is those members who have to argue the case for those views to the wider citizenry in the hard slog of canvassing, leafleting, and ultimately by standing as candidates for election. That is why it is necessary for there to exist some real means for their views to be heard in advance of most policy decisions. Party members, even elected representatives, should not be placed in a position of having to ‘like it or lump it’ when it comes to the adoption of policy. At the very least, the views of members should have the chance to be heard on policy.

I will say this, the fact that Fine Gael are the ones who stand to gain most in the next Seanad elections means the party can’t be accused as the government will be of changing the rules because they are going to lose out in the next elections.