Gavan Reilly

In Politics by Numbers, broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week.   

YOU MIGHT NOT know the name of Tomás Heneghan. If you went to any college in the country other than the five oldest universities, you ought to: he’s the reason you’re getting another vote in the next election.

Heneghan, a graduate of the University of Limerick, was the man behind a successful legal challenge to the format of Seanad elections – and specifically how only the graduates of Trinity and the NUI universities could vote to elect six of the country’s senators. A referendum in 1979 had allowed for other graduates to join them, but legislation to extend the vote had never been passed. It took Heneghan’s legal case, backed by the Free Legal Advice Centres, for the Supreme Court to rule that this absence of legislation was itself constitutional.

As a result, up to a million Irish citizens – no matter where they live, anywhere in the world – will have a vote in the next Seanad election. Those citizens, who might not even have a vote in Dáil elections depending on where they live, would now have a say (or a second say) in the composition of the Oireachtas that debates and passes laws, and sets the rules for the whole country to live by.

But it seems that people either don’t know much about it, or that they’re not bothered.

Paltry take-up to register for a vote

The Electoral Commission has been doing some research on the register for the new, unified, Higher Education constituency that will replace the old Trinity and NUI constituencies. The new six-seat constituency is open to graduates from over 80 different institutions – effectively meaning that anyone with a level 8 qualification, or higher, is eligible to vote.

But while that means between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people will be entitled to have their say, registration is … lacklustre to say the least. Only 71,850 people – which is somewhere between 7% and 9% of the eligible total – have actually done so.

We can’t draw a single big conclusion from this. It’s entirely possible that even those from Trinity and the NUI, who regularly vote in Seanad elections, didn’t realise the old registers were being thrown out. The old Trinity and NUI Constituencies had a combined 180,000 people registered to vote, but that’s not to say that those registers were in good shape.

A recent NUI register, for example, included graduates with addresses in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Zaire – addresses which, though self-evidently incorrect, could not be amended without a request from the graduate concerned. If a resident of the Soviet Union (dissolved 1991) or Czechoslovakia (1992) didn’t get in touch to do so, the entry remained, untouched and uncorrected.

There’s an interesting subplot in this: about 180,000 ballots would have been sent out to graduates to vote in the 2025 Seanad election, but only about 54,000 were completed. Many might think a turnout of 30% for a postal ballot is poor – it’s more likely to confirm that the registers were in such a poor state as to be virtually derelict, crammed with redundant entries from people who had moved or died without their alma mater being informed.

Early birds capture the ballot paper

It might also just be the case that people aren’t in a rush. That’s fair: if the Dáil lasts its full term, the next general election won’t occur until the winter of 2029, and the Seanad election wouldn’t be held until the first months of 2030. Objectively, that’s plenty of time to register – if the Dáil runs its full course. A snap general election would mean an unexpected Seanad election too.

But what if there was a snap election? Then things would start getting interesting. Voters are conditioned to think they can always get on the register at the last minute, because for Dáil elections that’s precisely what they can do. A ‘supplementary’ register of elections is created every year, and voters can get added to it if they act quickly enough within a few days of a general election being called.

But for the Seanad? Not so much. Neither the old nor new university panels have supplementary registers: when the register is published every June, it’s frozen in time for the next 12 months. Applicants have until the following February, to get added to the list for the next June. If a Seanad election were triggered today, only the 71,850 early registrants would have a vote, as the law wasn’t written to include any scope for last-minute additions.

Predictable as it may be, it would be a dismal situation for a Seanad election to be called, and for the energised public to start thinking about their vote – only then to suddenly realise that hundreds of thousands of voters hadn’t registered in time.

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The only thing worse than being talked about…

But perhaps that is the lesser of two evils. It may simply be that the public-at-large simply don’t care about the prospect of voting in a six-seat constituency with a million others for a chamber that isn’t exactly packing a punch.

Put it this way, with what is almost certainly a rhetorical question. The Dáil returned from its summer recess yesterday – did you know the Seanad hasn’t returned yet?

It’s not returning from recess until next Tuesday, a full 68 days after its last sitting. In the last sitting year, Senators gathered for only 97 days of business (though granted, that’s only five fewer days than the Dáil was in session). This isn’t all the fault of senators: one of the chamber’s main roles is to scrutinise legislation, and as I’ve documented here before, there wasn’t much of that happening in the first year or so.

But as the Dáil is set to get bigger, a Seanad that’s capped at 60 members, with the general (graduate) public voting for only six, may find itself struggling to capture public imagination. Even if the electorate does grow, and a healthier chunk of prospective graduates join the register, we’ll have the perverse problem of an election that takes too long to count, with similar votes to a European election but fragmented across a wider field of candidates on a longer ballot.

It’s now 13 years since the public voted against abolishing the Seanad, and subsequent reviews to breathe life into the chamber have all bitten the dust. The change to elections prompted by Heneghan is the biggest reform in a generation, so the government could easily decide not to bother with another.

But when the Seanad barely survived in 2013, when its ongoing summer recess is barely noticed, and when there are so few people hurrying to sign up for votes, fresh questions could easily be raised about its long-term future.