Who gets a vote for the Seanad election

As a poster said, if we make the Seanad exclusively the preserve of elected members of the Dail then it may well end up looking like, well the Dail! I have absolutely no issue with it being ever so slightly undemocratic if it means we have 6 senators who are not the preserve of elected politicians. In fact I like that idea. I also have no issue with the fact that it is university students who get to elect these 6 senators, again I actually like that idea. Give the youth a voice and all that. And before any says what about young people who don't go to university, find me an easy way to implement that and I'm all ears but until then save the whataboutery. As the same poster said, and I agree fully, "the key focus should not be on making the process more democratic, but making it more effective at giving voice and representation to a diversity of views and perspectives".
 
It's not university students, it's all graduates from a limited number of universities. If it was just the students then that would be different.

I'd also have a few elected by apprentices.
 
Purple said:
I'd also have a few elected by apprentices.
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well the proper analogy would be from qualified tradesmen, yes no problem, but their senators should be pulled from the taoiseach's and parliament senator numbers.
The university electorate is actually 150,000 so that is by far the largest electorate of all , its hardly elitism when the taoiseach gets to select 11 senators !!
Also with regards to democratic mandate, Leo Varadker barely got elected in 2020 as a TD let alone as a Taoiseach getting elected on 5th count, yet he still could appoint 11 senators, thats incredible power and elitism
 
Again, our Parliament is elected by all the people and we the people, through our Parliament elect the Taoiseach. There is no more democratic a process in a representative democracy. We the people, though the Taoiseach we elected via our TD's in our Parliament then appoints 11 Senators. In our representative democracy that is fundamentally democratic.

Giving a cohort of around 6% of the population the right to elect Senators, in addition to the senators that they elected through their Parliament via their Taoiseach, is fundamentally elitist.
 
You say that like it's a bad thing

I've got it, the 6 Senators should instead be elected by those aged 12 - 17 as a way of involving them in the democratic process.
 

The return of Katherine Zappone: ‘I really did feel the draw of Ireland as my home and one of the things that was part of that is that Ireland’s where Ann Louise is buried’

It is more than 40 years since Katherine Zappone first moved to Ireland with her late wife, Ann Louise Gilligan. They had met in 1981, while both were studying at Boston College and, madly in love, Seattle-born Zappone gladly agreed to move to Gilligan’s native Dublin a couple of years later.
www.independent.ie

I see Katherine Zappone can just waltz back into the country and just get straight onto the trinity college ballot paper for senate election, surely there must be better candidates than that, how does that happen?
 

She has been an Irish citizen for 30 years, set up An Cosan which provides education to disadvantaged women, was previously in the Oireachtas for almost 10 years, and has spent decades campaigning for human/civil rights in Ireland.

Compared to the likes of Rónán Mullen...!
 
Purple said:
If a TD has a degree from Trinity and a NUI College they get three votes...
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yes but their vote as a TD has many times more weight than their potential vote for a university senator, a TD vote has an electorate of just over a 1000 to elect 43 senators whereas the university electorate is 150,000 to elect only 6 senators. A rough calculation has a TD or outgoing senator vote being a 1000 times more powerful than the university vote. Therefore saying that a TD with a degree has 3 votes is not true since those votes do not have equal weight in reality he would have 1.002 of a vote and a university graduate has 0.001 of a TD vote if they were weighted for effect
 
Persia said:
Katherine Zappone was ‘sarcastic and ignorant’, mother and baby home survivor says of Seanad hopefu
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She was on newstalk this morning and was asked about the UN envoy job she was going to be given without competition and the party she held during covid restrictions, it was a very soft ball interview. I can't see her getting elected even for the Trinity "constituency" , its too long ago now since she was a senator and there are better and less controversial candidates running aswell
 
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