When you’re used to only seeing your politicians on the news or speaking at events, there can be a sense of surreal distance between you, that any interaction with them would be abnormal. All that disappears within five seconds of my answering the phone to Senator Lynn Ruane. She’s making her way into work after a late start, I’ve just managed to make it to the office in time, and assignments loom over me.
I think we were both “in between being absolutely hyper and exhausted” as she described herself.
Hailing from Tallaght, Ruane struggled with drug use at a young age, but used her experience to help others, volunteering and developing programmes to assist those struggling with addiction. Coming to Trinity through the Trinity Access Programme (TAP), Ruane served as Student Parent Officer at Trinity College Dublin Students Union (TCDSU) before becoming TCDSU President in 2015.
The confidence to do so wasn’t always there: “I wouldn’t have felt that I knew anything about being a student union president. I wasn’t overly involved in student politics. I had helped develop the role of the student parent officer, but that would have been the extent, I suppose, of my involvement at the time.”
Ruane was encouraged by a previous TCDSU President who drew a parallel between her work as a community activist and the work the TCDSU did “And I think that helped me, I suppose, understand that and frame it in my head in a different way, which kind of allowed me to feel a little bit more I suppose confident in going for the SU presidency.”
Encouraged by others to run for the Seanad in 2016, she thought “why not?”. Now this isn’t to say the difficulty of winning was lost on her; quite the opposite. “Nobody else had unseated an incumbent since David Norris […] you very quickly kind of go ‘oh okay’…But I also really felt that the campaign trail itself, or being part of hustings, or having to come up with some literature, would at least help shape the debate.” Ruane would beat those odds, narrowly unseating incumbent Sean Barrett to win the third seat. Ruane has been in the Seanad ever since, running again in 2020 with new confidence from her experience and wanting to “push that ship a little bit further… create some of the changes that I had instigated in the first term”. Ruane intends to run again in the coming Seanad Election, but doesn’t take the decision lightly: “you want to make sure that you will be the best representative that you could possibly be and have a good analysis of your energy level. So I did take a few months to kind of really make sure that my intentions and my energy and my goals were firmly going in a particular direction, and now I felt that I could continue to make an impact.”
She isn’t immune to cynicism, it’s hard not to be drawn into it after eight years in the Oireachtas. She herself admits she could answer a question on it differently on different days: “It really depends what’s pulling you in what direction at the time. Because, you know, it is easy to get cynical. It is easy to go, you know, is the institution and power of politics so big that you’re only ever going to create, you know, cosmetic changes or isolated changes, rather than being societal changes. And it’s about obviously being able to be proud and celebrate those small wins where they do have positive impact on people’s lives or particular issues…I think my ability to still know that you can make change in politics is mainly because I continue to make sure that I spend several times a month working with community reminding self, where I’m from, what I got into for how important a voice is on particular issues that maybe not everyone’s talking about”.
Ruane is proud of her work, shifting national debate on issues like non disclosure agreements (NDAs), with the government set to amend the Equality Employment act to prevent employers entering NDAs with employees that have made allegations of discrimination, harassment, or sexual harassment, following proposals she made, and drug policy (pushing for decriminalisation and health-led approaches).
On October 10th (a few days before this interview took place), the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drug Use was suspended for five minutes when a row broke out between Senator Ruane and Ruairí Ó Murchú, after Ruane took issue with the Sinn Féin TDs repeated referral to the drug trade during a hearing entitled “Engagement on a health-led approach”, accusing Sinn Fein of “speaking out of two sides of [their] mouth” on the issue of drug decriminalisation.
“All parties have moved [their stance on this issue], including Sinn Fein […] it’s not really the appropriate space or time to start looking at the very top levels of the drug trade, because that’s never going to be actually solved by the services. And it’s unhelpful to the people who are struggling every day with addiction or have been left with criminal convictions and can’t get on with their lives if we conflate the ideas. So for me, it’s making sure that people understand that we’re at a very, very important and exciting juncture for policy in Ireland, and it’s just making sure that we stay on that path, and we make sure that we create a safer society whereby drug users are not criminalised, but that also we address all the other issues. Ireland has one of the highest overdose rates [in the EU], and I just think that these are the people that we should be focusing on in that committee, and I think for the most part, people have, I just obviously had, you know, quite a negative responses to speaking about issues that would probably be best placed within a justice committee or focus on policing.”
While Ruane will be facing the same electorate in the next election, in 2030 things will change. Currently, three senators (including Ruane) are elected by Irish Trinity graduates, and another three by Irish graduates of the National University of Ireland (Encompassing UCD, UCC, UoG, and NUIM). In subsequent elections these panels are set to be reformed into one six seat panel elected by all higher education graduates after the Supreme Court found the continuation of these panels in violation of a 1979 amendment to the constitution which was meant to allow their expansion. These are just six of the 60 seats in the Seanad; 43 are elected to various panels by current councillors and senators and new TDs, and eleven are appointed by the Taoiseach. Currently no changes are on the cards for these other Seanad seats, despite promises for reform after a referendum to abolish the Seanad narrowly failed in 2013.
Senator Ruane thinks this isn’t enough.
“Obviously it’s a positive step to widen out the franchise in any shape or form, and it really, I suppose, also equalises education in a way […and] I think the Seanad does huge important work, there’s lots of hardworking senators in there, and I don’t think the public fully feels like they have access to that, or understand that, or can feed into that. So to widen the franchise to other universities is a positive step but it shouldn’t be the final step, and we should be ensuring that we can fully involve the country at large in the decision making around to represent them within the Seanad and I think that that can only ever be a positive thing for democracy and for the importance of having an upper house in the first place. I think it’s hugely important that the franchise on the other panels, on the vocational panels, are widened out, and that everybody has a vote on them, and that in and of itself will hopefully move us towards a more independent house.”
While this reform of the university panels may indicate some more equal treatment of third level education, Ruane thinks we still have much more to do to treat education with the importance it deserves.
“We have seen rises in literacy across the board, you know, across all social classes and constituencies. But what we do not see is a lessening of the gaps between those who have education and wealth and those who don’t. We’ll only really be able to measure [success of further investment and reform] if we see that people are not living at risk of poverty in the way that they are today, if they’re finishing school, if they have the choice to go on to third level education. If there’s any sort of poverty indicators in your community, any sort of low level educational attainment, that choice is not the same for you. If your mind is so stressed about where you live, your quality of housing, you know, where you’re going to have to move to next week because your landlord is throwing you out again, education is going to be something that becomes extremely unattainable because your own environment is stressed and unsafe.”
Do you think historically neglected communities are being listened to more in the time since you got into politics?
While the presence of people like Ruane does spark hope for representation of neglected communities in Irish politics, she thinks we still have far to go.
“I definitely think there’s more awareness, there’s more talk about poverty, there’s more talk about trauma […] and I think even though my voice within politics definitely keeps their agendas and experiences on the table, I don’t know if it has […] helped whole communities. I think politics and power need to radically change for that to happen”
With the recent rise of the far right and anti-immigration protests, particularly taking place in more neglected communities, I wanted to get Senator Ruane’s perspective as someone who grew up in an underserved community and had experience in working to better the lives of its members.
“When people are struggling with stress and in stressed environments, it becomes difficult, I suppose, to be able to feel that society is behind you and that the state is behind you and that the state is gone. So in reality, I would imagine that people who are actually far right from these communities is very small number. I think the majority of people just actually need to have a strong societal and state response to the issues that have persisted in Ireland for all these years, especially in relation to housing. I think if you have a society that feels protected by its state, by its democracy, it becomes harder, I suppose, to use any sort of politics of division to create an unsteady environment.”
Another of Ruane’s recent legislative pushes has been to get the Irish government to take more concrete action against Israel, previously sponsoring the Occupied Territories Bill in the Seanad alongside others in 2018, and the Arms Embargo Bill of May this year. While the Irish government’s rhetoric and symbolic action has been significantly critical of the Israeli government, especially relative to other EU member states, they have not yet taken prohibitive measures against the Israeli government.
“When we brought the arms embargo Bill, you know, we had Minister Eaman Ryan, kind of look at us as if we were making stuff up in saying that there was a potential that there was arms flying over Ireland, and he wasn’t doing enough inspections… a few weeks later it becomes very obvious that that was the case…there’s a political dissonance amongst politicians themselves, where they potentially either are purposely misleading, or else they else they are completely so in belief of their own thoughts and agendas that they don’t ever ask enough questions of their own mindset.”
“I think it’s spineless, actually, to not introduce [the bills]. And I do believe that the rhetoric of the Irish government… has had an impact internationally in terms of not allowing, what was the status quo in Europe… So I do think that that fight was important… but that voice only holds weight for so long, because now everybody is on board… yet, the government hasn’t moved on from speech alone… I think that that’s reflective of the government’s politics in a lot of ways, when it comes to a lot of issues… you don’t create change by just saying things alone. And I think the Irish government is in a really good position to really, really have a national and global impact that fulfils things for the people of Palestine. And I think if we don’t do it, it’s going to be a massive kind of moment in history where we look at people that could have made a really big decision and decided not to and decided that speech along with us.”
The government has previously explained the holdup of the Occupied Territories bill on the basis of advice from the attorney general, though more recently have been indicating that recent ICJ rulings may change the advice.
With an election taking place this month, Senator Ruane isn’t wholly satisfied with the options voters have on the table, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage.
“Even though there’s people within spaces that are driving good initiatives, if the power structures remain the same, then the experiences within society at large will most likely remain the same…It’s a lack of ambition. It’s a staleness among the state and institutions… But I don’t think that that means that we should become complacent and think that we can’t also massively influence and challenge that power and hold it accountable.”
She also expressed her support for lowering the voting age to 16.
In a political climate where a growing number of people are frustrated with our leaders and feeling their voices aren’t heard, it is a comfort to have people like Lynn Ruane around. I hung up the phone, and left her to continue her work.
Answers in this interview have been condensed and edited for clarity.
