Seanad Éireann (; Senate of Ireland) was the upper house of the Oireachtas (parliament) of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1936. It has also been known simply as the Senate, First Seanad, Free State Senate or Free State Seanad. The Senate was established under the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State but a number of constitutional amendments were subsequently made to change the manner of its election and its powers. It was eventually abolished in 1936 when it attempted to obstruct constitutional reforms favoured by the government. It sat, like its modern successor, in Leinster House.
Powers
The Free State Senate was subordinate to Dáil Éireann (the lower house) and could delay but not veto decisions of that house. Nonetheless, the Free State Senate had more power than its successor, the modern Seanad Éireann, which can only delay normal legislation for 90 days. As originally adopted the constitution provided that the Free State Senate had power to delay a money bill for 21 days (three weeks) and delay any other bill for 270 days (approximately nine months)—with the potential for a further 9 months' delay if the Seanad voted to suspend a bill just passed into law in order to initiate a referendum on it. In 1928, this second period was extended so that the Senate could delay a non-money bill for 20 months.
Composition and election
The 1922 Constitution provided for a Senate of 60 members directly elected. Members would serve 12-year terms, with one quarter of the house elected every three years. The members would be elected under the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote in a single, nationwide, 15-seat constituency.
However, to get the house started, the body's initial membership would be appointed by Dáil Éireann (the lower house) and the President of the Executive Council. To complicate matters even more, after the holding of the first direct election (1925), the constitution was amended, so that the final three elections to the Senate occurred by a method of indirect election.
Therefore, in the five elections to the Senate to occur before its abolition (replacement by the Seanad of the Republic of Ireland), three different systems were used. (The 1925 Seanad election was exceptional in that 19 were elected in a single contest using STV. This was the largest district magnitude used under STV anywhere in the world until 1995. The next time an Irish election used the whole country as a single district was in 1945 when the presidential election was held that way.)
It was originally required that membership of the Senate be limited to those who were over 35. Constitutional amendments made in 1928 reduced the minimum age to 30 and the term of office from 12 years to 9 years.
Today incarnations of the modern Seanad Éireann are given a new number after each senatorial election. Thus, the current Senate elected in 2016 is known as the 'Twenty-Fifth Seanad'. This was not the custom during the Irish Free State because the Free State Senate was elected in stages and thus considered to be in permanent session. However, as a gesture of continuity with its Free State predecessor, the first Senate elected after 1937 is numbered as the "Second Seanad". The Free State Senate, despite the occurrence of three senatorial elections before its abolition, is considered to have been a single Seanad for the duration of its existence and is thus referred for that whole period as the "First Seanad".
1922 election
Half the initial membership of the Senate were appointed by the President of the Executive Council (prime minister), W. T. Cosgrave; the other half were elected by the Dáil under the single transferable vote. The first 15 elected by the Dáil were assigned a term of nine years, the other 15 a term of three years. Cosgrave's nominees were divided by lot, 15 to serve for twelve years and 15 for six years. The President agreed to use his appointments in 1922 to grant extra representation to the Protestant minority in the state, most of whom were former Southern Unionists, to promote inclusiveness in the new Free State.
As a result, of the sixty members of the first Senate, as well as 36 Catholics, there were 20 Protestants, 3 Quakers and 1 Jew. It contained 7 peers, a dowager countess (Ellen, Countess of Desart, who was Jewish), 5 baronets and several knights. The New York Times remarked that the first senate was "representative of all classes", though it has also been described as, "the most curious political grouping in the history of the Irish state". Members included W. B. Yeats, Oliver St. John Gogarty, General Sir Bryan Mahon and Jennie Wyse Power.