[LONG DRAFT]

Election Communication

Litir um Thoghchán

University of Dublin Constituency

SEANAD ÉIREANN ELECTION

VOTE NO. 1 – JEFFREY DUDGEON

FOR AN INDEPENDENT VOICE REPRESENTING YOU IN THE SENATE

Why am I standing?

I am a liberal unionist, from Northern Ireland. I graduated in 1968. I won the gay rights case for Northern Ireland at Strasbourg in 1981. And I am the author of an important book, on Roger Casement.

I want you to vote me number one, in the three-seat University of Dublin constituency. Shane Ross is off to the Dáil, and badly needs replacing. David Norris will hopefully be a candidate for, and elected to the Presidency later in the year.

With Gerry Adams shifting to Louth and heading a 14-strong team, the Senate needs to hear a different voice form Northern Ireland.

I will be an independent Trinity Senator. I will raise minority issues from the Republic, from the north, and further afield. I will be nuanced, not politically correct.

Why me?

I was a civil servant in Northern Ireland. I will use my experience of public administration in Seanad Éireann.

I come from outside the state, but still within geographical Ireland, and will work to improve relations between peoples.

I have long been politically active, in campaigns and parties, and understand the need to build alliances.

I have written and engaged I controversy over the years, still enjoy historical researching and take pride in debating my work with critics and others.

I am personable, like people, and enjoy argument, discussion and interacting.

Why am I seeking your vote?

I am asking you to make history by electing to the Senate a liberal unionist from Belfast who is an Ulster Protestant thus allowing that voice to be heard and proving that majoritarianism belongs to the past. Winning a seat in the Senate would be further proof that the Belfast Agreement has worked and that normal politics have triumphed over warfare.

This may be the last election to the Seanad, as well as the end of the Irish university seats. There is certainly a need for the reform of graduate voting and the long-delayed extension of the franchise to all Irish graduates. However Ireland’s current crisis has been caused not by its upper house, but by populist politics, unaccountable government and an ineffectual and powerless Dáil.

The Senate has provided, over the decades, a unique platform and protection zone for the state’s minorities, its non-conformists, dissenters if not its dissidents, as well as differing voices from Northern Ireland. I would therefore oppose its abolition. But all the previous Senators from Northern Ireland have been nominated and were not fully representative of the people of Northern Ireland and in particular of those who define themselves as Ulster Unionists.

A new voice for Trinity

I am seeking your No. 1 vote, or a high preference, as one of those, a dissenter with a northern accent, who has only warm feelings for the people of the Republic.

Mine is perhaps a daring enterprise, which is why I would appreciate you taking a similarly adventurous step by voting for me, if only this once.

In a real sense, we are heading back to a time before partition when the differences between the two parts and the two peoples of Ireland, particularly southern Catholics and northern Protestants, are not as extreme as they became.

In the words of John Wilson Foster, one aspect of my election would also to be a persuader, “in the process of southerners acknowledging the repressed British components of their society.” This would be good for everyone across Ireland.

Anniversaries

This will not diminish the state’s independence which I respect, as I respect the constitution Bunreacht na hÉirean. It is however of particular significance when a visit by the Queen is imminent. Ironically, if unsurprisingly, the only country the UK shares a land frontier with is the one place she has not visited.

The next decade is also a time of danger with a decade of commemorations of events a century ago. They are a potential occasion for renewed bitterness and conflict. I would challenge historical inaccuracy and exaggeration to face down that danger.

The absence of Shane Ross, who served some thirty years in the Seanad before his recent Dáil victory in South Dublin, leaves a gap which I hope to fill. I believe I am well-qualified in experience and innovative ideas, not to mention independence, to replace someone who has given much to the Oireachtas and Ireland, north and south.

I would hope to be an iconoclast like him, challenging conventional wisdom such as the reason for the current despondency over the Irish economy. Although it may be cold comfort, it is not so unlike the UK’s or what it is going to experience in the next years.

Who am I?

Born in 1946 I was brought up and schooled in Belfast. I was a student at Trinity and earlier at Magee University College Londonderry where I participated in the University for Derry campaign. The failure to site the university in the city was, I have long argued, the trigger for the Troubles. I graduated from TCD in 1968, There followed many years of political and human rights campaigning in a host of organisations.

After participation in the civil rights movement, I spent nearly two decades working to normalise political life in Northern Ireland, regularise relations between the two parts of Ireland and address community divisions in the north.

These groups I joined included the Workers Association for the Democratic Settlement of the National Conflict in Ireland, from 1971, which majored on ending the claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, the Campaign for Labour Representation which attempted to get the Labour Party to take members in Northern Ireland, and finally the Campaign for Equal Citizenship (CEC).

The CEC was set up following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and sought again to bring mainstream politics to the province as an alternative to the permanent state of sectarian conflict.

Strasbourg case

Around this time, I was the successful plaintiff at the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg in a six-year case whose 1981 judgment relating to the right to a private life led to the passing of the 1982 law decriminalising male homosexual behaviour in Northern Ireland. This was a European first and one regularly cited in major human rights jurisdictions.

My civil service career for the first 15 years from the 1980s was in the health service’s pension and superannuation section with a short stint in social security legislation. I was also project manager for a successful computerisation of the Northern Ireland Health Service Superannuation Scheme (50,000 members).

In 1995, I took a career break from the civil service to work for Robert McCartney when he was elected UK Unionist MP for North Down. I acted as his constituency office manager, parliamentary assistant and political adviser for three years. In the second and third year I also worked for the party during the Stormont talks (with Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien) which culminated in the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement.

After I returned to the civil service in 2000, following a five year break, I worked in the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) at Stormont, as a Deputy Principal dealing with public health issues including healthcare-associated infection (HCAI), antimicrobial resistance, screening for diabetic retinopathy, and chlamydia, immunisation and public health and pharmaceutical law, until 2008. These are issues that remain an interest.

Referenda north and south

The step change for Ireland came with the 1998 referenda when, firstly, the people in the Republic voted to drop the claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3, something I had long campaigned for. And secondly, when those in the north endorsed the decision of Republicans to end their war and to take to peaceful means, in exchange for a guaranteed place in government. That is not to say that the conflict was not horrifyingly bloody, long and entirely needless.

I took the decision in 1998 to respect that legitimising referenda choice – the first vote of the Irish people as a whole since 1918 - and seize the opportunities presented, without changing any previous outlook. I felt the new institutions had to be worked and did.

Once the referendum results (north and south) were announced, I left my employment with the MP and his party. In time, I joined the Ulster Unionist Party in South Belfast.

Roger Casement biography

Later that year, I started researching a book on Roger Casement, the revolutionary separatist and campaigner for the protection of the Congolese and Peruvian Amazindians who was executed for treason in 1916. It took four years to write. The 692-page result was Roger Casement: The Black Diaries - With a Study of his Background, Sexuality, and Irish Political Life, published in 2002.

It was largely, but far from exclusively, about the authenticity of the diaries. The Casement controversy has not died away, or down, despite the positive forensic results on the diaries, as some still insist they were forged.

I continue to research Casement's time in Germany from 1914 until the Easter Rising, and hope to publish again on that period, his critical role in Irish independence and his political legacy. I recently assisted the 2010 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, researching in Co Antrim for his new novel on Casement, El sueño del celto.

I was Northern Secretary of the Irish Association for three years from 1999 and organised many key events in Northern Ireland, getting to meet and work with a host of memorable people from the Republic who had good relations in their hearts.

As an author and historian, I recognise the call of the past and feel I am almost uniquely qualified to address it in Ireland. One of my purposes in writing my biography of Roger Casement was to correct the many myths, exaggerations, and inaccuracies that surround him and his separatism, and also to dispel conspiracy theories. This remains my mission in this election.

I believe it is the rage induced by Sinn Fein’s historical interpretations that presents the greatest threat to peace on these islands. They are an open encouragement to dissidents. It is a key purpose of mine to address that question, if elected to Seanad Éireann, hoping in the process to draw our peoples together. Meeting one another and working together is the key to a better future.

That is why I want to represent Northern Ireland to the Senate and in the Senate.

My assentors and supporters include:

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Professor Roy Foster

Dr Brian Lacey

Professor Henry Patterson

Dr Austen Morgan

Professor Liam Kennedy

Senator Eoghan Harris

Professor Arthur Aughey

Jim McCormick

Professor John Wilson Foster

Lord Bew of Donegore

John Miskelly (Stonewall)

Professor Don Akenson

Ulick O’Connor

Michael McDowell (Washington)

Issues that I would raise or address in the Seanad, if elected:

Trinity

Representing the college, its academics, the staff, students and graduates while pursuing their needs and concerns.

Promoting alumni activity in the state, in the UK and in the wider EU.

Defending higher education.

Supporting liberal scholarship and academic freedom.

Ireland

Working the Seanad effectively by using my political and parliamentary knowledge and experience.

Acting as a counterweight, from Northern Ireland, to the voice of Gerry Adams TD (Louth) and his enlarged Sinn Féin team in the Dail.

Joining inter-parliamentary bodies that link the Oireachtas, Westminster and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Effecting re-negotiation of the bank bailout arrangements with the EU and IMF.

Warning of the need for a prudent and responsible approach to the centenary of the Easter Rising.

Recognising that the decade of anniversaries from 2012 has to become an opportunity for a balanced assessment of our history.

Removing discriminatory Irish language restrictions in relation to entrance to, and employment in schools, colleges and universities.

Giving good, independent and mature non-party counsel on day-to-day Seanad matters, as a friend from outside the state.

Reforming the franchise for the Seanad Éireann university seats.

Heightening youth employment opportunities by innovative changes to employment practices in the public sector e.g. more job sharing when filling vacancies and fewer expensive uncosted redundancies.

Enabling the abortion legislation required by the recent European Court of Human Rights judgement on protecting a mother's life within, and as permitted, by the Constitution.

Reducing drastically the pension privileges (amounts and payment timing) for Ministers and members of the Oireachtas and other state officials.

Reviewing the Croke Park agreement and privileges in the public sector that impede economic growth.

Enhancing the rights of, and protections for, minority groups and nationals in the state and ensuring that diversity, including Ireland’s Christian heritage, is valued.

Revisiting and reconsidering unimplemented aspects of the McCarthy report.

Recognising that confidence, growth, and economic prosperity in the Republic is valuable if not essential for Northern Ireland since we are increasingly and mutually interdependent.

Northern Ireland

Reviewing the Republic’s offer of funding of €500 (£400m) for the unwanted A5 Western Transport Corridor road dualling project from the N2 into Northern Ireland.

Calling for issues of the past in both parts of Ireland to be examined through historical rather than expensive public or judicial enquiries.

Proposing that Northern Ireland teacher appointments in Protestant and Catholic schools should no longer be exempt from fair employment law.

Taking part in the discussion on the Charter of Rights agreed in the Belfast Agreement for “the protection of the fundamental rights of everyone living in the island of Ireland.”

Vote your preferences right down the ballot paper

I need your 1st preference to represent you effectively. But remember, every preference counts.

It is worth noting that at the last election, Shane Ross and David Norris had a combined surplus of 2,159 votes for redistribution yet over a thousand people (1,093) did not vote beyond 1 and 2. Their ballot papers were discarded and had no effect when the surpluses for those two candidates were redistributed. The lesson is to go right down the ballot paper to ensure your vote always counts.

Website - biography, contact information and donation details

A biography and details of my views, history, interests and writings can be found at http://www.jeffreydudgeon.com/.

I would be pleased to hear from electors on issues that concern them and which they might wish to raise or discuss during the campaign. Please contact me by email, at jeffreydudgeon@hotmail.com

Voter registration and address changes for TCD

In the last Seanad election in 2007, some 8,000 ballot papers were returned as undeliverable. If you have changed your address or your name, contact the TCD Alumni/Senate office on Dublin 8961448/1218 or fill in the form from their website at

http://www.tcd.ie/vpcao/administration/records-awards/alumni-seanad-update-details-form.php

You can also register for the first time, by filling in and posting the claim form at http://www.tcd.ie/vpcao/administration/records-awards/assets/pdf/seanad-claim-form.pdf.

Returning ballot papers have to be received in college by 11 a.m. on Wednesday 27 April 2011, after which the count will commence.