ABSTRACT
Elections to Seanad Eireann rarely attract much coverage in the communications media and never come close to rivaling Dail elections in terms of the public interest they generate. This chapter examines the 1997 Senate election and its outcome. The Senate campaign is largely subterranean, away from public view, but is almost certainly more grueling even than a Dail campaign. As the most important component of the Senate, the vocational panels were the main focus of interest of the political parties. The party outcome in the panel elections turned out more or less as could be predicted and showed that the Fianna Fail strategy was relatively successful. There had been a tradition, dating back to 1938, of using the taoiseach's nominations to the Senate as a mechanism for securing symbolic representation for groups that would not otherwise be visible in public life.
