Senator Rónán Mullen is calling for a reform of the presidential nomination system in the wake of a huge number of spoilt votes in the recent presidential election.
Speaking to this paper Senator Mullen said: “I am calling on the Government to commission a report or set up an All Party Oireachtas Committee to look at the presidential nomination system and to recommend possible changes to the process.”
He added: “While I wish President-Elect Catherine Connolly well, and am hopeful that she will make a great President, there is no doubt that she has emerged from a process that has lost credibility in the eyes of many voters.”
Senator Mullen argued that the high number of spoiled votes in Friday’s Presidential Election “shows that hundreds of thousands of democratically-minded people objected strongly to this year’s presidential nomination process and to the limited choice on offer.
“These people do care about our democracy and their concerns cannot be lightly dismissed,” he said.
He added that “Political parties must stop seeing the Presidency as a ‘prize to be won’ for their party but instead look to the people who vote for them, their concerns and expectations.” That meant he said a diversity of candidates. Nobody is saying politicians have to nominate someone whom they do not believe should be president he added “But it does mean that political parties should consider more than one candidate where their Oireachtas numbers allow them to do so.”
He also said that councillors should “value their prerogative of nominating candidates and push back against any pressure or groupthink from party headquarters. Proposed reforms, such as that a nomination could come from 40 or 50 councillors across a given number of Councils, should also be considered. But the support of the Government of the day would be needed for this.”
