Why I won't be sorry to see the seanad disappear

At the moment Ireland has two parliaments, but tomorrow we will hold a referendum to decide if one of them should be abolished. I am in favour of the abolition and this post describes why.

1. The Dáil is roughly the equivalent of the English House of Commons and its members are directly elected in a pretty conventional election process with single transferable voting. This parliament has all of the normal powers you would expect to make laws and appoint governments etc.
2. The other parliament Seanad (or Senate) has virtually no power and is roughly equivalent to the English House of Lords. It is elected by a complex and slightly bizarre method:
• The bulk (43) are elected by an electorate which consists of members of local government groups e.g. county councils and city corporations. These positions are normally filled by politicians who unsuccessfully went for election to the Dáil (the deadline for nominations is set to be after the result of the Dáil election is known - hence the public perception that they are essentially rejected or second best politicians.
• 6 members are elected by graduates of either Trinity College Dublin or the National University of Ireland (3 each). At the time when the Seanad was formed these were the only universities in existence. Over the year, graduates of some of the newer universities have occasionally complained about the unfairness of it - but in general nobody gets too worked up about it because nobody cares enough about the Seanad to get very worked up about it.
• 11 are directly appointed by the incoming Taoiseach. This means that the party with a majority in the Dáil is almost guaranteed to also have the majority in the Seanad. By tradition the Taoiseach's nominees have included some well respected public figures who were not associated with the government party, but this is only after they have appointed enough party members to ensure that they have a safe majority.

Much criticism has been made of the fact that the Senate electorate are effectively the elite and privileged members of society. Of course, when the state was initially founded this was the intention. The idea was to form a second chamber which would have a larger influence from the protestant elite (who were more likely to have a university degree)  which formed during British rule and to moderate the more extreme influences of the uneducated masses. However, I think that this motivation hardly makes sense in modern Ireland (I don't have statistics  but I imagine that Catholics and Protestants have broadly the same chance of having a university degree today).

The Seanad has effectively no real powers to influence legislation  In theory they can delay the passage of legislation, but this has rarely ever been used. Therefore it is effectively a debating club. While I agree that some senators have contributed to public debate, these senators are a minority and in any case we could rectify the loss by asking the newspapers to provide better coverage of the debating societies that exist in all universities.

Nobody really supports the current Seanad, but the debate has included many people who argue that we need a second chamber to provide more debate and they would argue that we should keep it, but reform the election process. This might make sense - but nobody has proposed a realistic proposal for exactly how the reform should be done.

The campaign in favour of abolition has been mainly focussed on the potential financial saving, estimated to be €20m. However, I don't think this is really a large amount of money and it would be good value for money if it really improved out law making process (but as I said earlier it doesn't so I think I will be voting for its abolition).