Fianna Fail to lose Seanad

Even if they recover enough to be the largest party in the Dail in 2012, and one can never rule that out, Fianna Fail may well have lost control of the Seanad as a result of their local election defeats. 43 of the 66 senators are elected by the outgoing members of the Oireachtas and the councillors, who are not overwhelmingly Fine Gael and Labour. Even with the 11 Taoiseach’s nominees, a putative FF taoiseach in 2012 might not be able to command a majority in the Seanad.

In the Seanad, the 6 university senators have always been independents. Of the others, at the moment, the split is FF 27, FG 14, Labour 6, Green 2 – and that includes the 11 nominees. Excluding the 11 nominees, FF has 22, FG 14, Labour 6 – both Greens and both PDs were nominated, and Sinn Fein got one elected on the Agricultural Panel

Last week, the electorate was predominantly FF, but now FG has more councillors – indeed FG and Labour together have twice as many councillors as FF this morning. Even though FG and Labour seem chronically incapable of presenting the people with a pre-election pact, they might actually agree to co-operate in the Seanad election. This raises the prospect of 450 FG and Labour councillors, plus a fair few of the 131 (so far) Independents lined up to vote against the 208 FF councillors. Adding in the votes of outing Senators and TDs will obviously soften the odds against FF slightly, but not enough.

So this means that if FF mange to survive as the largest party, and manage to cobble together a coalition in the Dail in 2012, a FF Taoiseach could be looking at a Seanad in which as few as a dozen FF senators, plus his 11 nominees, face over 30 FG and Labour senators, some SF, the 6 University senators and a few more Independents. Even a FF-Labour coaltion might not have enough seats to have a majority in the Seanad. There is no previous body of experience in which a FF led government in the Dail might deal with a Seanad under opposition control. While there are legal vand traditional limits on the powers of the Seanad, it is hard to see how a FF Taoiseach in 2012 might function.

The other interesting implication is on the role of the Seanad as a safety net for failed TDs. Clearly, on these numbers, FF deputies who lost their seats in the Dail in 2012 will not be able to run to the last refuge. This has been a tradtional strength of FF – they could always depend on parking some ‘also rans’ and ‘nearly made its’ in the Seanad but this is gone. FG and Labour, on the other hand, have an an entirely novel opportunity – they expect to win Dail seats in 2012, and will be on the look out for promising candidates to whom they can now offer the additional safety net of a seat in the Seanad. They can easily afford to recruit a dozen George Lees or Sean Kellys, run them for Dail seats and almost guarantee that if the Dail seat doesn’t materialise, they will put the newbie into the Seanad. This allows them to field a team that might finally win an election, and, if they don’t mess up, hold on in 2017 as well.

I don’t think FF realise just how bad last week was for their future prospects. Even if there is a miraculous economic recovery (possible, not likely) and they manage to convince people they are responsible (very possible – people still think the government runs the economy) no matter how well they do, they still can’t win. Interesting times.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “Fianna Fail to lose Seanad”

  1. […] counts about how this would impact on the Seanad and a few people have written about it on-line Michael Cosgrave for one but no one in the mainstream press that I can find. It could be that the story wasn’t […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

css.php