Privilege of Seanad vote is a nonsense

This piece appears in today's INM Irish regional newspapers.

By Michael Commane
Last week I received my voting papers for the Senate election. Indeed, it was by chance I managed to get them as they had been posted to an address I left some year ago. It is an address that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Because I spent three years as an undergraduate at UCC I am entitled to vote for the candidates who are going forward for the three seats on the NUI panel. I have been voting in the Seanad election ever since I finished at UCC in 1979.

It might be my last time to have the privilege so it only sounds right and proper that I use my franchise and cast my vote.

I remember years ago my late father would receive a ballot paper from his UK based union where he was asked to vote for someone. As a child it greatly confused me because I would hear my father say he knew none of the candidates going up for election so what was the point in his voting.

And then history repeated itself. I joined the Nationalist Union of Journalists in 1998 and over the years I have received ballot papers. It is mostly voting for candidates in the UK going up for jobs in the UK so I never heard of the people. I treat it all as some sort of a game and eventually vote for people about whom I know absolutely nothing. And now here I am with my list of 27 candidates for the three NUI seats in the Seanad.

Just as there need for a change in voting for the Seanad, so also is there need for a change on how Irish people vote for candidates in UK based trade unions. It’s sort of silly if you don’t know for whom you are voting.

I have a fair idea about two of the candidates - Feargal Quinn and Rónán Mullen. Both are current senators and are in the public domain. Feargal is a past pupil of Newbridge College where I taught. I might even have taught his son Eamon. He was certainly a pupil in the school while I was there.

Feargal seems decent enough and over the years has come up with a number of good ideas. I am also aware of John Crown and read some of what he has written. He seems to be a man with good ideas. Along with that we both went to the same secondary school – more of the old parochialism!

All I know about Rónán Mullen is what I hear and see about him in the media. I don't like his politics and his right wing opinions.

I cannot abide the right wing Catholic constituency, who seems to know what God is thinking. And it always irritates me greatly when the media equates all Catholics, especially priests, with right wing thinking. We are not an amorphous group and we can think for ourselves. My skin breaks out in goose pimples when I read right wing Catholic material.

As for the other 24 candidates I know next to nothing about any of them. Linda O'Shea Farren is interested in campaigning for the rights of the disabled so I will give her a vote.

I am not at all for the abolition of the Seanad but it certainly needs restructuring and the idea that I have a vote is pure and simple nonsense. At least it is crazy that I have a vote and my cousin, who is far wiser than I, has not a vote because she went to DCU.

Would it be sort of cheeky to say everyone who has a vote for the Seanad does not deserve to have one, hence the system of voting for the House needs to be changed.

I can’t recall ever before seeing so many names on the ballot paper. And in a way this time round it might well be a little like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Come to think about it, in general elections how many of us know all that much about the candidates for whom we cast our vote? How much of it is on a hunch, how much of it depends on how our parents and friends vote? How much of it depends on what’s in it for me? Democracy.

When I have this written I will put my completed ballot paper into the ballot paper envelope, then put it along with the form of declaration of identity into the larger covering envelope and post it.

And all that, just after completing the census form and an eight page sick leave form for the Department of Social Welfare having been absent on sick leave.

At least I don’t have to pay for the stamp when posting the ballot paper. I just help pay for the salaries of the senators. Come to think of it, I’m paying for the stamp too – probably many times over.