OPINION: Mayo's Duffy taking the Seanad route

It would be perfectly reasonable for Mark Duffy to consider himself to be on the first rung of the ladder to Dáil Éireann following his success in the just-completed Seanad elections. By and large, the Seanad is widely regarded as the warming-up area for eventual election to the main chamber of government; one need look no further for confirmation than to note that half of those elected to the Upper House had tried for, but failed, to reach the Dáil. So the Ballina man has precedents aplenty to look to as he sets his sights on higher things.
Time was when the Seanad was an arcane, half-secret, comparatively genteel institution that commanded little public attention and where the general public would be hard pressed to name any of its members or try to explain what functions they performed. But hard-nosed politics has taken over, and the main parties now look to the Seanad as a training ground for promising novices who are on their way up in the political world. (Occasionally, of course, the Seanad is used as a soft landing for those whose days in senior hurling are over and who are enjoying a last summer before emerging into the cold winds of civilian life.)

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Mark Duffy will be walking in the footsteps of a large cohort of Mayo political representatives who served their time in the upper house prior to making the leap into the more hotly contested battle ring of the Dáil. His townsman, Paddy O’Toole, found his feet there before ascending to ministerial office. Michelle Mulherin, Jim Higgins and the late John O’Mahoney all cut their teeth in the more sedate chamber.
So too did the late John Carty, the colourful Joe Lenehan of Belmullet, and his equally colourful north Mayo rival, the legal practitioner, Paddy Lindsay. Rose Conway-Walsh, Sinn Féin frontbencher, served in the Seanad, as did Lisa Chambers, while several decades ago, Myles Staunton of Westport, his near neighbour Martin Joe O’Toole, and Martin Finn of Claremorris undertook their apprenticeships in the Seanad.
Some were content to serve the state in the Seanad only and left to one side whatever ambitions they might have had for higher things, most notably long-serving Paddy Burke, who retired this year, and Dr Keith Swanick in Belmullet, who served but one term in the upper house.
And then there were those who, had circumstances been more favourable, should have made it across the divide into the Dáil chamber. Frank Chambers, Patrick Durcan and Ernie Caffrey were among those who, by common consent, were deserving of a call to the main house, but who fell just short in the white heat of Dáil electoral battle.
This year’s Seanad election also brings the curtain down on the anomaly whereby the two university constituencies were permitted to return three senators each. Since 1937, Trinity College and the NUI have both enjoyed that privilege, an elitism which has now been abolished, but only on foot of a constitutional challenge, which the Government lost. From now, they will be replaced by one constituency, with six senators to be elected by graduates of all of the State’s third-level institutions, a franchise which until now had been denied to graduates of the country’s ‘new’ universities.
That air of deference to the status of university graduates was a particular feature of Irish political history. The creation of the two Seanad constituencies – Trinity and NUI – in 1937 was a throwback to the privileged position accorded the universities at the formation of the State. For the first decade-and-a-half of independence, both universities were allowed to return three TDs each to Dáil Éireann, one of which, incidentally, was Conor Maguire of Claremorris, later to be appointed Chief Justice of Ireland.
When Mark Duffy takes his seat in the Seanad, he may not be aware of the Mayo link which occupies a notable footnote in our national and local history. Maurice Moore was honoured, on the foundation of the State, to be appointed to the first Seanad by the President, William T Cosgrave. It was an appointment that cost him dearly. A few months later, in February 1923, his home, Moorehall, was burned to the ground by ‘irregulars’, because of the local perception that the senator was pro-treaty. The irony of that ill-considered judgement became manifest when, in 1938, he was appointed to the Seanad for a six-year period by de Valera. This time, he was appointed as a Fianna Fáil nominee.