User:Jnestorius/March 1938 Seanad election

< Members of the 2nd Seanad

The vote was an indirect election in which the 354 voters were an electoral college comprising all 137 TDs and seven members of each of the 31 local authorities. Each county or city council held a nomination meeting at which seven were either nominated unopposed by prior agreement or else elected by single transferable vote.

Nominating bodies
Under the 1937 act, a maximum of 15 bodies were permitted on each panel. Five organisations unsuccessfully appealed against the rejection of their registration as nominating bodies, namely: (on the Cultural and Educational Panel) the Irish Medical Union, General Nursing Council, Irish Nurses' Union, and National Union of Journalists; and (on the Agricultural Panel) the Dublin Cowkeepers' and Dairymen's Association. The appeals committee comprised TDs William Norton, Patrick Beegan, Michael Colbert, John A. Costello, Michael Kennedy, Patrick Little, Bernard Maguire, Séamus Moore, John M. O'Sullivan, and Patrick Smith.

There were only two nominating bodies on the Labour Panel: the large Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU, affiliated to the Labour Party) and the small "Cottage Tenants and Rural Workers Association" based in Ballingarry, County Limerick. The ICTU and Labour felt the Ballingarry group was small, had been defunct, and was revived solely for the purpose of securing Fianna Fáil nominations. In protest, the ICTU refused to nominate election candidates, so the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera had to add nominees to complete the nominating bodies subpanel of the Labour Panel. The Labour Party's 13 TDs boycotted the poll altogether in protest, neither nominating nor voting on any panel. Its local councillors participated in the councils' nomination meetings before the boycott decision was taken, and 11 were nominated to the electoral college, in which they refused to vote.

Results
The rules used differed from those used in Seanad panel elections since 1947. All 132 candidates from the five panels were listed together, in alphabetical order of surname, on a single ballot paper "nearly a yard [90 cm] long". There were a fixed number of candidates to be elected from each of the ten subpanels, so that when that number was reached all remaining candidates from that subpanel were eliminated, even if candidates on other subpanels had fewer votes. The returning officer was not the clerk of the Seanad but rather Wilfred Brown, a civil servant in the Department of Local Government.

Counting took place on 28–29 March by 12 assistants under Wilfred Brown's supervision. Checking and sorting the ballots and tallying the first-preferences took six hours, with 15 candidates elected on the first count, 12 of whom were former Oireachtas members. Eight more were elected that evening before counting adjourned for the night. After 33 counts, 35 remaining candidates with zero votes were eliminated in one stroke. Subsequent distributions of fractional votes generally proceeded subpanel by subpanel.