KILDARE AND THE SENATE
Kildare Voice July 21 2007
Kildare and the Senate
By Eoghan Corry
Kildare’s representation in the new senate is at its lowest for decades. Unless you count in Athy-born Brendan Ryan, it ends a long tradition of Kildare residents and people with Kildare connections in the upper house. In its first manifestation, half of the members were nominated by Taoiseach
William Cosgrave. In its second manifestation, as elected last week, 43 of the 60 members are elected by county councilors and TDs, six by University graduates, and 11 are nominated by the Taoiseach. In effect it has been a staging point for potential or defeated Dail candidates rather than the forum for specialized knowledge which was originally intended.
Lots of these rest-home senators have come from Kildare. Gerard Sweetman, one of three Kildare men to become Minister for Finance, started his political career in the Seanad when he was elected to the agricultural panel in 1943 and 1944. Patrick Norton served in the Seanad from 1969 to 1973 after his spectacular defection from Labour, the party his father had led, to Fianna Fail and defeat in the 1969 general election. Patrick Malone was a member of the same Seanad from 1965 to 1973 apart from a spell in Dail.
Patsy Lawlor was a senator from 1981-82, while Jack Wall, Sean O Fearghail, and the late Kathleen Walsh were members of recent senates. Longest serving recent Kildare senator was John Dardis of the Progressive Democrats, once by election and three times as a Taoiseach’s nominee between 1989 and 2002.
But he was there for only a twinkling compared with bloodstock breeder James Parkinson, elected to nine Senates under both systems between 1922 and 1948. His contribution to the debate on the 1925 Betting Bill recalls the time he used to train for Boss Croker in America.
Other long servers included schoolteacher and Labour party member William Cummins, a member of the original senate from 1922 until its abolition and de Valera’s reconstituted Seanad from its constitution until 1943, and Joseph O’Connor who was elected four times between 1925 and the abolition of the senate in 1936.
Labour party member Michael Smyth was elected three times between 1943 and 1951, reflecting the tendency of Labour and other parties to do well in the Seanad.
In the 1920s, Dermot Robert Wyndham, the Earl of Mayo, also sat in the senate which among a high proportion of House of Lords style aristocrats. Another long serving senator had Kildare connections. Ross Kinlough McGillycuddy, whose son Dermot lived at Bishopscourt near Kill, was elected in 1928, 1931, 1934, and in both Seanad elections in 1938.
Most of his contributions concerned regulation of the legal profession and game bird hunting, but he was a lone voice in opposing the draconian censorship laws when they were introduced in 1928, arguing that censorship should be administered “requires to be administered “with tact, discretion and broadminded commonsense.”
He also seconded the motion that triggered off the most important debate in the entire history of the Senate, a comical affray about censorship after The Tailor and Ansty was banned, shortly after its publication in 1942. The motion claimed that the Censorship Board, “had ceased to retain public confidence, and that steps should be taken by the Minister for Justice to reconstitute the Board”.
When the vote was taken, after a long discussion on whether or not country people talked like the Tailor and his wife, or whether such talk could ever take place when women were present, or whether, as Senator Foran contended, one only met Tailors and Anstys in lunatic asylums MacGillycuddy fled to the ancestral peaks for only Senator Joseph Johnson of Trinity College voted with Sir John Keane.
References: www.irlgov.ie or www.oireachtas-debates.gov.ie Censorship of publications Motion 18 November 1942
A lively commentary on the debate is to be found in the ‘Begrudgers guide to Irish Politics,’ by Breandan O hEithir.
