Last week, when we debated the Bill brought forward by Senator Byrne and his colleagues, I said that in 2003, the then Senator Mary O'Rourke, who I believe was Leader of the House at the time, chaired a committee on Seanad reform to which I contributed. This Bill, because it is more comprehensive, is a better vehicle within which to bring about that reform for the very reason that I pointed out last week when we were debating Senator Byrne’s Bill, which is that his Bill would effectively bring about a lopsided Seanad and a very skewed electorate, with 800,000 voters electing 10% of the 60 Senators while the others would remain to be elected by the much smaller electorate that currently applies.
That is a huge regret on one of the most important days in this Seanad and for Seanad reform.
Key terms by TF-IDF across 7,733 words from 18 speakers. The summary quotes the highest-scoring sentences verbatim — nothing is paraphrased.
Tellers: Tá, Senators Robbie Gallagher and Seán Kyne; Níl, Senators Michael McDowell and Victor Boyhan.
Party shown is the one each member held on 2020-11-18, frozen by a dated join — not their party today. The Oireachtas API publishes no date of birth and returns an empty gender field for every member in this period, so no age or gender breakdown is shown.