I move:
That the Fifth Stage be postponed until the next sitting day after the passage by the Seanad of the Committee Stage of a Bill to amend the law relating to the filling of casual vacancies in the Seanad.
This amendment that I have put down is practically a repetition of what has been done before, but the intention is to avoid the necessity of having to repeat that time and again. No date has been fixed for the further consideration of this Bill, but it is proposed that the consideration of it shall not be before the date on which the Committee Stage of any Bill which deals with the method of electing Senators at a by-election is passed. Perhaps it would be as well to state, very shortly, the purpose and the intention of the amendment. The Constitution at present provides the means whereby vacancies in the Seanad shall be filled by election. The body to elect is the Seanad. The Constitution Bill which is before us deletes those provisions, and says that the method of election for the Seanad in the future shall be by some means to be provided by law. If we pass the Constitution Bill as it stands before us that will annul the already existing provisions for filling vacancies in the Seanad, and there will be no machinery at all available for filling such vacancies. It is intended that new machinery should be created, and a Bill is in the course of discussion in the Dáil No. 19. —I thought it would have been passed before now—to provide new machinery, but one does not know how long that Bill will take to go through the Dáil, and officially and formally we do not know what it contains.
Therefore our position is that if we pass the Constitution Bill there will then exist no means of filling vacancies in the Seanad, and no means will be available until a new Bill has passed this House. My proposal is that we should not deprive ourselves of the machinery for filling vacancies until we know not only the kind of machinery that is going to take its place, but that the machinery is ready. Under the proposal before the Dáil, it is well understood, of course, although, as I say, not officially and formally before us, that the new method for electing Senators at a by-election will be by the two Houses acting together. That machinery will not be in operation until the Bill has passed this House, and I think it would be quite wrong, injudicious and in every way out of order, thinking merely in the terms of decency and good order, that there should be any prolonged interregnum or any interregnum at all between the cancellation of one method and its substitution by another. That is my sole purpose in moving the amendment—that the Seanad will be in a position to say: "this machinery is going to replace the machinery which we are now about to abolish." I, therefore, move the amendment, which proposes to give effect to what I have said.
