It is no small matter to be amending a constitution and it is some time, to put it mildly, since a constitutional amendment was introduced by a Minister for Education. Although I do not object to this happening, it strikes me that the Taoiseach having basic, overall charge of the Constitution, it might be regarded as more appropriate for him to introduce the amendment. However, I am not going to raise any quarrel on that issue, and am glad to see the Minister for Education here with this amendment. In passing, it might be worth noting that the office he holds was held at an earlier stage by a university representative from the Oireachtas, the late Professor Eoin MacNeill. He was not a university representative of the Oireachtas, but was elected by the graduates of the National University of Ireland after the Redistribution Act of 1918, to represent them at Westminster. Good man though he was, he saw fit not to take up that onerous responsibility in Westminster, but it is a fact that the present Minister for Education, in political lineage at any rate, is one of a chain of men one of whom owed at least part of his political career to the graduates of a university.
The second thing which we need to take into account here is that we are not only amending the Constitution, which is a serious thing in itself. If I may be more accurate, we are not only offering the people of Ireland the opportunity to amend the Constitution; we are offering them the opportunity of amending it in a particular way and we are introducing—or giving them the opportunity of introducing—into the Constitution a new principle. The new principle involved is that the election of a certain number of Members of the Oireachtas hitherto carried out by university graduates should henceforth be carried out not only by university graduates but by graduates from other institutions. I do not propose the extension of the principle of educational representation, if one may put it thus, in the Oireachtas, but it needs examination and it can be talked about in some detail.
To some extent we are dealing here with a pig in a poke. We have not been told in any great detail, or in any detail at all, about the Minister's precise intentions in relation to the distribution of the six seats which are currently voted for by the graduates of Dublin University and the National University of Ireland. I suspect that the major debate that will take place will be on whatever formula the Minister chooses to adopt when the Minister for the Environment brings in the appropriate legislation. The debate will in turn centre on the issue of whether one should have representation by institutions or whether one should have a large global constituency electing the required total number of members. I propose to reserve my position on this issue because the Minister has not adverted to it and perhaps it is not even strictly relevant, but I daresay that this will be where the major debate will take place.
Even at this stage it is possible to indicate at least some of the options open to the Minister. The National University of Ireland have three constituent colleges and Dublin University have one. If each of these institutions together with their associated colleges were to be given one seat to themselves that would leave two seats of the six for grabs, as it were. Even that would, as a solution, lay itself open to objections from some sources in that it would give some institutions far greater representation for a graduate than others. No doubt the Minister for Education and the Minister for the Environment will be grappling with these problems and will let us know the result of their deliberations in due course. No doubt they will be getting plenty of free advice on the matter both from the universities and the other institutions of higher education concerned.
The principle which we are discussing and offering the people of Ireland the opportunity to amend through this legislation is a very old one. It is none the less odd for being old, but it is old. It goes back in relation to Irish Parliaments to 1613 when the University of Dublin obtained the right of returning two Members to Parliament. This right continued until the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 when only one Member was returned to the Imperial Parliament and the right of voting for MPs was, initially at any rate, confined to Provost, Fellows and scholars. The situation continued unchanged until 1832 when the Irish Reform Act created a new situation under which the University of Dublin obtained the right of returning two Members of Parliament and the right of voting was extended to include ex-Fellows and those who had obtained the degree of Master of Arts or higher degrees in the University. In order to have the right to vote on this register of Dublin University from 1832 onwards you had to pay £1 a year, the equivalent then, I suppose, of the 2 per cent levy or something like that. It must have been quite a lot of money in 1832 but, presumably, not too much for the well-heeled university graduates of that time.
In 1918 the Redistribution Act added the National University of Ireland to the category of institutions entitled to elect representatives to the British Parliament. Professor Eoin MacNeill was one of those representatives. Events took a rapid course of change after 1918 and in 1922 the question arose for the first time as to whether the university representation which had hitherto existed in relation to the British Parliament should be transferred to the native Irish Parliament, Dáil Éireann. It is interesting to note that in that debate there was not a division. Various people spoke on the resolution in connection with the Constitution which was involved at that point. Some people were against it but there was not sufficient weight of opinion to divide the House on the matter.
It is interesting to look at some of the rationale for introducing this mechanism into the Dáil at that time. One of the possible objections raised to university representation in the Dáil was that people would have plural votes, that they would be entitled to vote both in their natural geographical constituencies and in their university constituencies. I suspect that one of the reasons why this constitutional amendment had such an easy passage was that the right of plural voting was abolished. In other words, graduates of the universities concerned had to make up their minds whether they were going to vote in their university constituencies or in their geographical constituencies. Once having made up their minds they were not permitted to vote in both.
The proposer of the amendment to the Constitution on the principle of university representatives was Professor William Magennis, who made a fairly detailed speech in support of his various proposals and stressed two points which were to recur in the general debate on this process over the years. The first was the rightful voice of education in politics. The Official Report of 4 October 1922, column 1109, Volume 1, reports him as saying:
Now you have in this, the University representation, an opportunity to go back to an earlier conception of the social fabric, in alignment of its elements. In the old Gaelic days an t-ollamh—the professor—was next to the King. I think without asking for social privileges such as were attached to that office, that we might at any rate do something here in our institutions that would mark a public sense of the Gaelic spirit's desire to honour education—the great spiritual, the great vitalising influence.
This was one very strong strand of the debate at that time. It was backed up by another strand which was an argument which held not so much force then as it does now, even though today it still does not hold as much force as it ought. It was that in giving particular political representation to universities one is not really legislating for an élite since the universities were less and less the preserve of an élite. In a way it is sad to look back to 1922 and 1934 and the other years of these debates and to read in the statements made the degree of misapprehension under which very well-known and very well-educated people themselves were about the accessibility of university education to the ordinary mass of the people. Contrasted with the 1830s it was certainly very substantially greater but not as great as it might have been and not as great as it is today. It might be argued that even today university education is not as accessible to many people even as some of the politicians and statesmen who spoke in the 1920s and 1930s thought it was then.
To give an indication of the general impression, I will quote from the debates concerned. When Professor Magennis was advancing his case, he said, at column 1108 of the same volume:
I look forward to the time
—He was anticipating rather than stating the situation that existed—
when the university graduate voter, in this University representation that I venture to claim for you, shall include every stratum of the population, when he shall have—and there is no incompatability whatever in it—men of every walk of life, engaged in all varieties of occupation, who have received this university stamp as a result of higher studies, and of having undergone what we claim, at least—the broadening and widening influence of university study and university culture.
Later on, especially in 1934 when the question of removing the seats from the Dáil came up, some of the speakers were similarly insistent as part of their defence that the university electorate was by now no means an elite. In 1934, for example, there was one Fianna Fáil Deputy—I believe his name was Tom Kelly—who objected, though not so strenuously as to vote against it, to his Government's proposal to abolish the university seats in the Dáil. He quoted the speech of Thomas Davis to the College Historical Society in 1840 and in particular his phrase, "I tell you, gentlemen of Trinity College the peasant boys will soon put to the proof your title to lead them". At the time Deputy McGilligan was under the touching if somewhat inaccurate belief that 90 per cent of the students and graduates of universities were the sons of peasants or the sons of peasants at one remove. Deputy Costello went so far as to aver at column 527, Volume 52, of 1936, "Everybody at the present moment in this country has an equal opportunity of getting into university". Sadly, of course, it was not true in 1936 and it is not true today.
The proponents of university representation in the Dáil were lucky because they were not seriosly opposed in 1922. In 1934 there was a very different situation. There was a Fianna Fáil Government in power. They were not in power by very much and had considerable difficulty with the Seanad as then constituted. Their difficulty was not only confined to the Seanad but to the university representatives in the Dáil who were making the then Government's majority somewhat more precarious than it otherwise might have been. It is not difficult to see in the sequence of events that occurred in the mid-thirties and late thirties part of a very deliberate logic by the Fianna Fáil Government of the time to remove some of the political problems that faced them in their early years in Government. In doing so they had some rationale because the question of giving university representation in the Dáil was very much, certainly by the thirties, a concept which it would be difficult to defend wholeheartedly. The problem was that at that stage the Seanad was going through a sea of fire. The simple option which might have solved the problem of transferring them from the Dáil to the Seanad did not exist. It existed in 1937 and was put into operation at that time. At the time they were abolised in the Dáil it was not altogether quite as easy.
Whatever about the political logic of the needs of the Government of the day, it is difficult to deny that, if you have a Seanad in which there is ab initio the question of indirect representation, universities have as much of a right to be represented there as anybody else, especially in a situation in which the Seanad is supposed to be a vocational body.
The question of plural voting has not been abolished. It is technically possible in this day and age for one person, assuming he were Taoiseach, to have at least 14 votes for the Oireachtas. He has 11 in that he nominates directly on his own word 11 Members to the Seanad. He has one in his geographical constituency where he resides. He has another, either as a Member of the Dáil or as a member of a local authority, and he could have two more if he were a graduate of the two universities. That is a fair amount of plural voting and it is technically possible for one man to exercise all those votes, some of them very important votes, in an Oireachtas election. Granted that the Seanad is allegedly a vocational body, there seems to be no reason why the universities should not have the right of representation transferred from there to here.
In passing, I must refer to one aspect of this problem which was dealt with by Deputy E. Collins when he pointed out that the University Senators had a reputation of being independent, that they were in some sense above politics. It is true that some University Senators have had the good reputation of being above politics. It is also true that many of them have been extremely political. I would deprecate—and I imagine Deputy Collins would too—any suggestion that politics was something to be above. Independent University Senators are free from the tyranny and constraints of the party whip but they are not free ultimately from the right to vote and the obligation to vote. Voting is a political action whether you take a party whip or not. The best Independent Senators that I have known have not been shy to exercise that right and that responsibility which they have been put there to do.
Politics embraces people outside the political parties as well as inside them. If there was a wider acceptance of the fact that the stuff of politics is the stuff of daily existence and the bread and butter issues that affect people in their ordinary everyday lives we might have a healthier political climate.
The question in relation to representation of the universities in particular is one that has also excited a fair amount of argument from time to time. It is interesting to note that one of the few people to oppose the 1922 development in the Constitution was the then Leader of the Labour Party, Deputy Thomas Johnson, who said at column 1117, Volume 1:
The education test is put forward, but I maintain that the fact that men or women have graduated in a University does not fit them any more for the selection of representatives than the fact that men have become fathers, and women have become mothers, or men have done military service, or men have gone to sea.
At column 1120 of the same debate, Deputy Sears asked: If the universities, why not the churches, the farmers, the trade unions, the teachers? Later on in the same debate Cathal O'Shannon, who was a Labour Deputy, in an intervention which to some extent mirrors what the Minister has brought before us today, said at column 1126: "But in that whole educational body, I would want to insist that everybody connected with education activity throughout the country should form the Constituency for representation". So the Minister's proposal has a lineage and it is an honourable one. If education is a constituency it should be a constituency not unnaturally cribbed and confined. The Government in 1922 was, interestingly enough, divided on the issue and perhaps not surprisingly. Deputy O'Higgins came in at column 1121 to say:
Deputies will probably hear with a certain relief that there is no official attitude on this particular question,
A column later he was venturing into the realms of prophecy with the statement:
The National University may, for instance, break up into several Universities.
This was in 1922 so the Minister's action in that regard also has a lineage which goes back as far as 1922.
In relation to the proportionality of the voting within the six seats which are at present disposed of by the two true universities, the situation has changed over the years. When Deputy Sean T. O'Kelly was introducing the Constitution Amendment (No.23) Bill in 1934 to delete university representation from the Dáil he pointed out that in Dublin University one Dáil Deputy was elected by 1,087 people; in the National University of Ireland one Deputy was elected by 1,552 people and nationally one Deputy was elected by 11,699 people. The case he made for abolition of the university seats in the Dáil, for all that if may have been prompted by the Government's political needs at the time, was a fairly strong one and he saw fit to reply at the time specifically and in advance to the potential accusation that in doing this the Government were doing down the Protestant minority in this country. It is not unreasonable to assume in fact that the original 1922 amendment which gave three seats to Trinity College, despite its relatively small number of graduates, may have been the result of some behind the scenes discussions and agreement between the statesmen of that time. Certainly, reading through the debates, it is very difficult to escape the impression that there had been some prior discussion on the basis of which university representation was to be given to Dublin University in the Dáil as part of an effort at the very beginning of the foundation of the State to assure Northern Irish men and women, many of whom went to Trinity and were graduates of Trinity, that the new State had something to offer them, that it was not concerned to discriminate against them and that it would, if anything, give them representation in the Parliament of the country out of all proportion to their numbers. Deputy O'Kelly, when he was introducing the Bill, referred specifically to this problem and referred to the potential accusation that abolishing university representation in the Dáil would be a blow against relationships between North and South. At column 481 of Volume 52 he said:
To make such a claim now is but to plead that the interests of the minority are not identical with those of the nation as a whole, and any fears which members of that minority may have felt as to their treatment at the hands of their fellow-citizens must have been dispelled long ago.
With all due respect to Deputy O'Kelly there may still, from time to time, be fears that have not been dispelled but that is by the way. The fact is that it was seen then as an issue important enough by the Government of the day for them to make specific reference to it. The most telling speech on that occasion in that debate was made by the late Deputy Lemass in Volume 52, column 518 and 519, in which, with a very cool and devastating logic, he demolished the claims of the universities for special representation in the Dáil. There is also the general question and the secondary question of whether or not the universities are entitled to be represented in the Seanad. Deputy Lemass at the time was referring to the Dáil and the way he put it was this:
The question which this House has got to answer is: why a graduate of one of our Universities, whether he lives in this country or outside it, whether he pays his taxes to our Exchequer or to some foreign Exchequer, should have the same rights of representation in this House as ten persons who are not graduates?
He went on at column 519:
This Bill is designed to secure equality of political rights in this country.
Deputy Lemass's speech provoked indignation of a high degree on the opposite side of the House and provoked statements such as I imagine few university Members of the Oireachtas would want to stand over today. One of them, Professor Alton, at column 529 of the same volume said:
This doctrine of the same rights and that all men are equal, is not true to life or nature. It is false physiologically and it leads to political disaster.
That was a fairly extreme statement for a university professor in 1936 as I am sure the Minister for Education would agree.