Anti-intellectualism at root of proposed Senate abolition

It is with great regret that I will view the passing of the Senate. Some of my best friends are senators. All joking aside, however, this most impending cull of intellectual representation in Ireland cannot be seen as just another spending cut. Extremist governments target intellectuals. History has quite often shown that it is the last resort of a despotic regime to launch an attack on scientists, scholars, writers, academics, doctors and educators. One could become paranoid, if one thought about it too long. 

But we are living in dark times. Skilled journalism has worked hard to uncover the truth behind the schemes that cost the state billions. And yet those who were responsible, for a variety of constitutional and political reasons, cannot be legally brought to account. The constitution would need to be reformed, it seems, in order to properly call those responsible to justice, and the people have already voted on that one, so that ship has sailed. Too bad. Yet legislation can be passed quite swiftly in the form of the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (FEMPI) Act, which, it seems to me, is specifically designed to attack the livelihoods of doctors and other professionals, or the Competition Act, which removes their rights and freedom to associate in trade unions and to undermine the work that professionals do on behalf of education, science and healthcare. 

The price of everything, the value of nothing

And so we are being asked by public referendum whether or not we value the Senate. Whether or not the pitiful public exchequer can afford the luxury of the privileged upper house. Well, can we afford not to have its luxury? Can we truly afford a political system that does not permit the luxury in public life of academic advocates for social reform – advocates such as Senator David Norris, who single-handedly lead a campaign against state homophobia. Can we afford to live in a society without these advocates for social justice – advocates like Prof Ivana Bacik, Senator Mary Henry or Senator Mary Robinson? Should the human rights campaigning records of Senator Mary McAleese or Senator Michael D Higgins, the passionate authorship of Senator Shane Ross, or the patient-care advocacy of Prof John Crown be considered too great a luxury for this small island while we add the half-pence to the pence and prayer to shivering prayer? 

The truth about the Senate is that it never, and would never, have cost the Irish taxpayer anything near the sums of money nor the social demoralisation and destruction that the amateurish and uneducated behaviour of some Irish financiers has cost. You could bankroll a thousand Senates for the money that has been wasted by the kinds of heroes who were regarded as innovative, entrepreneurial and “good” for Ireland. 

What may be irksome to those in other areas of political life when it comes to the Senate is that it is the only area of government in which some elected members do have to come from a formal background of intellectual life. It contains the only division of social governance from which the leadership must have a university degree and be elected by fellow graduates, and therefore have a responsibility to their educational background, their intellectual interests and philosophies, and have a clear passion and mission for Ireland that is grounded in scholarly pursuit, in knowledge and in the promotion of social progress. 

The intellectual life (and death) of the state

Now, more than ever, this country is in desperate need of intellectuals. This country, far from needing to punish and proletarianise doctors and academics, desperately needs well-educated people to take the lead in public life – as advocates for social progress, for a fair and accountable healthcare system, and for an end to the profound lack of moral courage in politics as well as in business and financial life. 

Current government policy of persecution of doctors and academics is causing an obvious brain drain to the Antipodes and the New World – and the hurt to our own medical profession is acute, and extremely painful. The Irish Medical Organisation highlighted this stamping-out of the medical profession in Ireland when it published that poignantly emotive advert showing a boarding card as a university degree. But despite the hurt to wider society that it is causing, this current campaign to exile Irish graduate doctors is being dressed up as an economic benefit, a cost-saving exercise. 

The grim future for Irish intellectual life is that, if the current trajectory persists, we will become a nation depleted of knowledge; a tin-pot ex-colony, bankrupt of academic life. 

The current trajectory, and it is a dangerous one, is that while multinational industrialists must be protected, doctors and academics, scientists and scholars are regarded as quite legitimate targets of economic exile, and have therefore become the popular target of a concerted campaign of removal, by this current political class. There is a crass vulgarity that abounds in Irish politics nowadays, a despicable anti-intellectualism. The government, in its campaign to abolish the Senate, will ask you whether or not as an Irish citizen, you can afford keep it. The question that, as graduates and academics, as physicians and scientists, we need to be asking is: how on earth can we afford to abolish it now?