Seanad election: Counting is under way
The Seanad is located inside Leinster House in Dublin, the same building as Dáil Eireann (the lower house).It holds 60 members known as senators; eleven of them are nominated by the taoiseach (Irish prime minister), and 49 are elected in Seanad elections.
Technically, there are no political parties within the Seanad, as each person is said to be there independently; however, they divide into groups when it comes to voting on government business.One senator takes on the position as Cathaoirleach (speaker). Like in the Dáil chamber, the Cathaoirleach chairs proceedings and must act impartially.
What does the Seanad do?
The main function of Seanad Éireann is to vote on or amend legislation. Bills can start and end in the Seanad as well as in the Dáil.However, the Dáil has the power to override the Seanad's rejection of a bill.The Seanad can also take part in the removal of the president from office or a judge of the Supreme Court, Court of Appea,l or High Court. It also has input on declaring a state of emergency.
Who can become a senator and how?
To become a senator, you must be a citizen of Ireland and over 21.Those disallowed from becoming a member of the Seanad include:people serving a prison sentence of more than 6 monthsa judge a senior official of the European Union a civil servant or a member of An Garda Síochána or a full-time member of the Defence ForcesConor Murphy will be hoping to join a long list of people from Northern Ireland who have sat in the Seanad. Former deputy leader of the SDLP Seamus Mallon was nominated to the Seanad by then-taoiseach Charles Haughey in 1982, holding the position of senator between May and December of that year.
Brian Friel is remembered by most as one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, but he also sat as a senator. Friel was nominated by then-taoiseach Charles Haughey in 1987 and held the position for two years. Writer and broadcaster Sam McAughtry was born in the predominantly protestant Tiger's Bay area of Belfast. It would seem unlikely that he would sit on the Seanad. However, the trade union representative and a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party became the first person from Northern Ireland to be elected rather than appointed as a senator in 1996.
In 2014, Máiría Cahill waived her legal right to anonymity relating to claims of sexual abuse in the BBC Northern Ireland documentary 'Spotlight – A Woman Alone With the IRA'. The story was reported extensively in the media and debated in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Houses of the Oireachtas.Cahill was elected as a senator in November 2015.
How is the Seanad elected?
This is often noted as the most confusing part of the Seanad operation. The Seanad election must take place up to 90 days after Dáil Éireann has dissolved. This means that the new Dáil is formed before the Seanad election.Forty-nine of the Seanad's 60 members are elected, and 11 are nominated by the taoiseach.However, not everyone in Ireland can vote for the 49 elected members.Forty-three are elected from panels of candidates representing specified vocational interests. The panels are cultural and educational, agricultural, labour, industrial, and commercial and administrative.Candidates for panels are selected by nominating organisations or by members of the incoming Dáil or outgoing Seanad.The following people may vote in an election of panel members:Members of the incoming DáilMembers of the outgoing SeanadMembers of county councils and city councilsThe remaining six members are elected by university graduates of Trinity College Dublin and the National University of Ireland (NUI).
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Herald Scotland
2 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Is Scottish Government secretly working to kill off Ardrossan harbour?
Everyone who has made travel plans will have to adjust accordingly or cancel, including visitors from far and near heading for a major Gaelic festival, Ceòlas, in South Uist. Mallaig and Oban are 87 miles apart, while accommodation tends to be at a premium in July. Just their luck – one more example of consequences which continues to be visited upon people and islands. This fresh wave of cancellations and redeployments stems from the basic fact that the CalMac fleet has been run aground in terms of numbers and maintenance, despite millions being spent, quite literally in some cases, on plugging the holes. CalMac say plaintively: 'We are doing the best we can to maintain service levels with the vessels available to us during this period'. Read more As I never tire of pointing out, CalMac are more sinned against than sinners. They are at the sharp end of delivery while the real culprits are the Scottish Government (aka Transport Scotland) and its procurement quango, CMAL, which have failed to provide the routine flow of vessels required. Ferries which are a decade and more past their natural lifespan are worked harder and harder, with predictable consequences. After three years of setting its face against any compensation for businesses, the Scottish Government noticed there is an election coming up and conceded through gritted teeth a 'resilience fund' for the worst-hit islands. Arran is included but, not being an island, Ardrossan is not. Yet there are few places that have endured more economic pain than the port which had been the gateway to Arran for 185 years. What distinguishes the case of Ardrossan is that it is, in my belief, the victim of a long-term strategy to extinguish its role and thereby, to a large extent, its raison d'etre. Other places in the CalMac network are victims of incompetence and political opportunism even if nobody set out to do them harm. The case of Ardrossan is different and those responsible should be exposed and their objective, even now, frustrated. The story goes back to 2015 when Troon – part of Associated British Ports – lost its Northern Ireland connection when P&O dropped its Larne route. Desperate to plug the gap, they offered the Scottish Government £8 million to transfer the Arran service to Troon. There is no retrospective wisdom involved here as I wrote at the time that this initiative was 'solely at the behest of Associated British Ports, which has lost its Irish services and needs a substitute. It is blatantly opportunistic'. CalMac will restart a limited and temporary service (Image: free) ABP should have been shown the door. By this time, what later became the Glen Sannox had been ordered from the Ferguson yard, specifically to operate between Ardrossan and Brodick. There should have been no room for doubt but ABP, to my certain knowledge, had friends at court. The Transport Minister, one Humza Yousaf, ordered a review, which set the hare running. A campaign was mounted in defence of Ardrossan and, ostensibly, it prevailed. But it didn't really. When the Glen Sannox was ordered, it was supposed to be operational by 2018 so obviously, it was necessary for CMAL to be in negotiation with the owners of Ardrossan, Peel Ports. Otherwise, how could it happen? Due to events at the Ferguson yard, there was then a seven year delay in delivering the Glen Sannox – but in the course of these nine years, not a finger was lifted to secure the status of Ardrossan. On the contrary, the quiet transition to Troon continued to be encouraged, supposedly to give temporary cover while awaiting Ardrossan's readiness. For good measure, in October of last year, the Transport Secretary, Fiona Hyslop, appointed Stuart Cresswell who, until 2023, had 'full operational responsibility for all of ABP's port operations in Scotland including the Port of Troon' to the board of CMAL. But like I say, there is an election coming up and my old constituency of Cunninghame North is up for grabs. The votes of Ardrossan will be significant so on February 19, Ms Hyslop 'instructed Transport Scotland and CMAL to explore a potential purchase of Ardrossan Harbour'. Little has been heard of this since. I was curious to learn how much substance there was to this 'instruction', so I lodged a Freedom of Information request with CMAL, asking to see the exchanges between them and the Scottish Government about Ardrossan in recent months. This week I got the response, with around 95 per cent of the content redacted on the catch-all grounds that 'the balance of public interest lies in withholding the information'. Read more However, one interesting line had either slipped through the net or been left in deliberately, in which the chief executive of CMAL, Kevin Hobbs, wrote, the week following Ms Hyslop's instruction: 'We do not believe and have expressly stated that resilience at Ardrossan (given the entrance through the roundheads and turn) will never be as resilient as Troon given the open sea approach'. In other words, the chief executive of CMAL could hardly have been clearer that they have no interest in pursuing what, in public, has been their obligation and the Scottish Government's aim. So the question now is whether Ms Hyslop's 'instruction' is ever intended to prevail? I make no claim to nautical expertise but that is not the issue at stake. The real question is whether, consistent with Mr Hobbs' comments, CMAL and Transport Scotland have been (and still are) working to ensure that Ardrossan never again will be the gateway port for Arran. If that is the case – as I believe it is – the people of Arran and Ardrossan have, for the past decade, been cynically and cruelly deceived. To that, I object strongly – and call for an inquiry into the full circumstances, without evasions or redactions. Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003
Spectator
9 hours ago
- Spectator
Tim Davie shouldn't quit over Glastonbury
There probably never has been a time when a governing party much liked its MPs. If you are on a mission, as governments imagine they are, you are always impatient when your own side raises objections. But it is only recently that governments have seemed positively affronted by the idea that their MPs should have a say. This was encapsulated by Sir Keir Starmer when he dismissed Labour's backbench revolt over welfare cuts as 'noises off'. Off what, exactly? Legislators have the sole right to legislate and that includes the right to refuse legislation. Those, like Rachael Maskell, who parade their consciences may be tiresome, but there is no way of governing this country except through parliament (though people like Lord Hermer are striving mightily to alter this). Prime ministers are oddly blind to the ultimate consequence, which is that their MPs get rid of them. Sir Keir's blindness led to his capitulation on Monday night, turning his gigantic majority into his potentially fatal problem. It is always confusing for the BBC to decide what to ban, cut or edit. In 1972, in the wake of Bloody Sunday, it banned Paul McCartney's rather tame song 'Give Ireland back to the Irish' ('Great Britain, you are tremendous/And nobody knows like me/ But really, what are you doin'/ In the land across the sea?') but allowed John Lennon's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' which attacked 'You Anglo pigs and Scotties/ Sent to colonise the North', complained about 'the concentration camps' (unspecified) in Northern Ireland and regretted that although 'the cries of 13 martyrs filled the free Derry air', 'not a soldier boy was bleeding/ When they nailed the coffin lids'. If you do not have your own moral compass, you will be guided only by levels of public outrage and will find these hard to predict. In the case of Bob Vylan, the story is about management of coverage, not endorsement, of dreadful views. It does not exhibit the monstrous anti-Israel bias daily apparent in BBC documentaries, news reports, BBC Verify, BBC Arabic, Jeremy Bowen etc. It is more a lack of due diligence. I doubt the resignation of Tim Davie would produce visible improvement. He is actually the first D-G even to admit and pursue the anti-Semitism problem. More shocking is the way the Glastonbury crowd (and therefore, unthinkingly, the BBC) rolls with this type of thing. If – unimaginable, I know – an extreme-right popstar had appeared and announced that he hated 'Zionists' and that Israeli soldiers should die, he would have been howled down. But the left has so normalised Islamist extremism that the overwhelmingly white, middle-class establishment audience has no sense of its weirdness. In a passage not widely reported, Bob Vylan announced to the Glastoholics, 'We are not pacifist punks here. We are the violent punks.' Some of them cheered. Was that a tattoo of a guillotine that I saw on his right arm? Does Glastonbury have to suffer the fate of the Manchester Arena before they understand? Ex-prime ministers are sparing in their public interventions. So far as I can see, Rishi Sunak had made only one Commons speech (as opposed to asking questions) since leaving office – on Rachel Reeves's first Budget. Last week, however, he made his second, in Westminster Hall. It began: 'I last spoke on this subject in this very place back in 2016. A lot has changed in the last nine years – notably, ten chief secretaries to the Treasury, seven chancellors and, indeed, five prime ministers – but one thing that has not changed is my view on grouse shooting.' From that good start, Mr Sunak went on to argue that the sport 'is a part of our local social fabric, and… one of the world's great conservation success stories'. He criticised the tendency of 'some conservationists… to act as though farmers and gamekeepers are somehow trespassing on Britain's landscape, but without their hands repairing our dry-stone walls or their dairy cows keeping the fields lush, the rural beauty of our countryside would soon fade. Heather moorland… is rarer than rainforest, and 75 per cent of it is found right here in Britain. It is a national treasure.' The fanatic Chris Packham, who was attending the debate, was seen to hold his head in his hands as he listened. I hope this oration marks the start of Mr Sunak's comeback. Charm is easy to recognise but notoriously hard to describe. Sandy Gall, who has just died aged 97, had it. When he and the tipsy Reggie Bosanquet co-presented ITN News in the 1970s, charm was visible nightly on the nation's screens. It had something to do with being at ease, a lack of self-importance and the sense that the pair were often repressing laughter. Sandy retained these qualities in many dangerous situations covering wars for more than half a century, and into old age. In 2010, when he was 82, we accompanied him to Afghanistan. It was supposed to be a holiday, plus a visit to the charity which he had established to give prosthetic limbs to children injured by the war when he first covered Afghanistan, hidden in Russian-occupied territory, in the 1980s. Sandy's two rules for later journeys there were that he should never have security – it just makes one a target, he said – and that he should always carry a bottle of whisky, which was illegal. It being high summer, he had advised us not to bring waterproofs, but when we flew in a light aircraft to see Bamiyan and the mountainside which held the colossal Buddhas smashed in their niches by the Taliban, we found the place flooded. The airport was on a plateau. Our hotel was visible below, surrounded by water. Undismayed, Sandy ordered ten donkeys to carry us through the inundation and breakfast to eat until these could be found. By the time we had finished the breakfast, the waters had sufficiently receded for the donkeys to be laid off. He was a dear man, neither broken by the horrors of war, nor puffed up by his courage in the face of them – a true reporter.
Belfast Telegraph
11 hours ago
- Belfast Telegraph
DUP accuses other parties of Irish language ‘carve-up' after Belfast Council spending agreement
The DUP has accused all non-unionist parties in Belfast Council of an Irish language 'carve-up' after it was agreed at City Hall this week the bulk of last year's underspend will go to a new Gaeilge strategy. At the July meeting of the full Belfast Council, held on Tuesday evening elected representatives agreed a Sinn Féin proposal on how to use the £2,940,000, underspend from last year's net expenditure budget.
