Abstract
Elections to Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish parliament, take place well out of the public eye and have been aptly described as ‘subterranean’.1 The nomination process is obscure, the electorate is small, and the body that emerges rarely captures the news agenda. Nevertheless, Seanad elections are sometimes regarded as the most hard-fought Irish elections of all. They are in every sense a professional politicians’ election, with most of the seats filled by the votes of elected representatives.
Background information for this chapter comes from conversations with successful and unsuccessful candidates in the election, party officials and Seanad electors, as well as from observation of the count. Helpful comments from John Coakley were received on an earlier draft.
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Notes
John Coakley and Maurice Manning, ‘The Senate elections’, pp. 195–214 in Michael Marsh and Paul Mitchell (eds), How Ireland Voted 1997 (Boulder CO: Westview and PSAI Press, 1999), p. 206.
The fullest assessment of the Seanad is to be found in All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, Second Progress Report: Seanad Éireann (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1997), especially the section on ‘Options for the future of Seanad Éireann’ by John Coakley and Michael Laver, pp. 32–107. For a brief introduction see Michael Gallagher, ‘Parliament’, pp. 177–205 in John Coakley and Michael Gallagher (eds), Politics in the Republic of Ireland, 3rd edn (London: Routledge and PSAI Press, 1999), at pp. 198–200.
Basil Chubb, The Government and Politics of Ireland, 3rd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1992), p. 198.
Panel electors must vote in the presence of an authorised person, such as a county registrar, county manager or garda superintendent. This rule was introduced to eliminate corrupt practices, which marked some early Seanad elections. See Thomas Garvin, The Irish Senate (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1969), pp. 25–6.
Although the requirement is vague, and it is rare for a candidate’s entitlement to run even to be challenged, there have been occasions when candidates have been ruled ineligible to run on the panel for which they have been nominated. See, for example, John McG Smyth, The Theory and Practice of the Irish Senate (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1972), p. 31.
John Coakley, ‘The Seanad elections’, pp. 135–45 in Michael Gallagher and Michael Laver (eds), How Ireland Voted 1992 (Dublin: Folens and PSAI Press, 1993), p. 140. Democratic Left was a party to the left of Labour that merged with Labour in 1999.
Gary Murphy, ‘The role of interest groups in the policy making process’, pp. 271–93 in John Coakley and Michael Gallagher (eds), Politics in the Republic of Ireland, 3rd edn (London: Routledge and PSAI Press, 1999), at pp. 274–7.
All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, Seventh Progress Report: Parliament (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2002), p. 38.
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© 2003 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Gallagher, M., Weeks, L. (2003). The Subterranean Election of the Seanad. In: Gallagher, M., Marsh, M., Mitchell, P. (eds) How Ireland Voted 2002. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379046_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379046_10
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