This month, three Senators will be elected by Trinity Graduates. With the retirement of David Norris last year, there are two incumbents; Lynn Ruane, who The University Times spoke with in October, and Tom Clonan.
Clonan has held the seat since 2022, winning a by-election triggered after Ivana Bacik entered Dáil Éireann, but he’s been busy; drafting two landmark bills he hopes to get passed in the next session, but first he needs to be re-elected.
Clonan’s motivation to run for the Seanad stemmed from his family’s experience with disability; his son Eoghan, one of his four children, lives with a rare neuromuscular disease. Symptoms first presented themselves when he was 18 months old, a moment Clonan describes as “Alice through the looking glass … when we entered the parallel universe that you enter if you’re disabled in Ireland, or if you’re a carer”.
Acting as the primary carer for his son since 2004, Clonan says that “Ireland is absolutely by a country mile the worst country in the European Union to have a disability”. He points to numerous problems present in the system, including children on scoliosis and urology waiting lists not receiving care on time and disabled adults being inappropriately placed in nursing homes due to a lack of accessible independent living.
Asked why Ireland might be so behind other countries in this area, Clonan posits the historic role of the Catholic Church in Ireland as a cause, as “what the state did in the early decades of this state was that it contracted out all of its health and care and education function to the religious institutions, and they’re fundamentally charity based. So in other jurisdictions, like, for example, in Germany or France, the state provides supports of education and health on a rights basis, on a legal basis for citizens, whereas in Ireland, that never really happened.” Clonan also believes that “what’s missing is one central unifying force and one central unifying narrative, which I believe is, you know, like the LGBTQI communities, is this radical emancipatory campaign based on human rights and not on a kind of a peace deal, a little bit here, a little bit there.”
While it didn’t form the basis on which he wanted to run for the Seanad, Clonan’s time in the Defence Forces was also a key influence on his perspective in politics. After graduating from Trinity, Clonan joined the Defence Forces in the late 1980s, and went on to serve on peacekeeping missions, most notably in south Lebanon in the 1990s. Clonan was stationed in Lebanon during Israel’s Operation Grapes of Wrath, witnessing the killing of innocent Lebanese civilians.
Clonan also undertook a PhD at DCU during which he researched the treatment of women in the Defence Forces, unearthing a pattern of discrimination and harassment, a problem that an independent review group’s 2023 report found was persisting.
Clonan ran for the Seanad in 2016 and 2020, initially as more of a protest campaign to raise awareness on disability issues in Ireland. He succeeded in 2022, in what came as “a big surprise” to him and his family.
As a Senator, Clonan has focused primarily on disability and foreign affairs / defence policy. Earlier this year he was part of a successful campaign against proposed government changes to disability benefits which would have introduced means testing in what Clonan dubbed “a discredited austerity policy from the UK”. Clonan also campaigned against the 40th amendment to the constitution (the “care” amendment) in the March 8th referendum. The proposal was to replace current wording in the constitution that recognised the contribution of women to the state by their “life within the home”, with wording recognising the importance of domestic care. The issue that Clonan and many other disability activists argued was that the proposed wording was an attempt to avoid placing direct obligations on the state to support carers, treating it as a private family matter. The proposal was defeated by a 30% margin.
Clonan also pushed the government to fully ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Ireland had ratified the convention, but now, as of November 30th, Ireland has ratified an optional protocol of the convention which submits to the oversight of a UN committee where individuals can hold states more accountable to their commitments.
Within the Seanad itself, Clonan has introduced two key pieces of legislation, which he says will hopefully improve Ireland’s treatment of people with disabilities. In July 2023 he introduced the Disability Miscellaneous Provisions Bill, or Disability Rights Bill as he calls it. Clonan says this bill “will bring Ireland into line with the rest of Europe with regard to rights based legislation”.
“At the moment, the only thing that disabled people are legally entitled to is an assessment of their needs,” Clonan continued. “but our citizens don’t have a legal right to any of the interventions, support services, therapies or surgeries that are set out in an assessment of needs.”
The bill would legally oblige the state to provide these services. The bill has completed three of the five stages to pass in the Seanad before being sent to the Dáil, with several government Senators breaking ranks to allow it to progress. A government amendment was put to delay the bill by a year, but the government Senators ended up not appointing tellers for the vote, effectively killing it without needing to break the whip.
Clonan’s other key bill is the Disability (Personalised Budgets) Bill, introduced in October 2024. The bill aims to give more “control and autonomy to the disabled citizen to manage their own budget, as it were, so they would have the legal right to what’s set out in their assessment of need, but it also takes the control away from the HSE or from for-profit service providers”. The bill was sponsored by 27 of the 60 Senators, including several senior government senators.
Clonan hopes to pick up where he left off with both of these bills, now with a full term to work on them, and he is optimistic about passing them, given the broad support he has had so far.
Drawing on his experience in the Defence Forces, Clonan has also been vocal on foreign policy in the Seanad, such as advocating for continued Irish neutrality: “I see no benefit whatsoever to Ireland joining NATO. And we’re not politically neutral in that, you know, we’ve [governments] called out. I applaud the government for their moral leadership and calling out the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, and we’ve called out Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, but militarily we should remain neutral.”
Despite the Irish government’s rhetoric and actions so far with regards to Palestine, Clonan believes the Irish government needs to do more, calling their unwillingness thus far to pass the Occupied Territories Bill “a huge disappointment”. “[The Israeli government is] showing contempt for the international rules based order. So whilst the Irish government have shown considerable moral leadership and moral courage in calling out the genocide and the retaliation against the Palestinians and the Lebanese, if you don’t enact something like the Occupied Territories Bill, then it’s just words. There have to be consequences for their actions.”
Asked about the moves to reform the Seanad university panels to allow all university graduates to vote, Clonan praised the work of Thomas Henaghan in bringing the court case against the government, but believes more needs to be done. “I think the broader reforms that were proposed in the Manning report [which recommended that a majority of Senators be directly elected], I think they should be implemented because the upper house, I think, could play a very, very useful role in ensuring that the lower house always acts in the public interest, because we’ve had so much groupthink over the years, like the upper house shouldn’t be just a place where the business of the lower house just gets rubber stamped, which is pretty much what happens at the moment.”
Having started out protesting outside Leinster House, running for the Seanad as a protest, and now having been a Senator for two and a half years, I was interested to hear how his unusual experience may have shifted Clonan’s perspective on politics.
“The big advantage is that you have face time with the people who make the decisions. So you get to speak directly to the Taoiseach or the Tanáiste or the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Social Protection. And the privilege of being a Trinity senator, the privilege that my fellow graduates have given me, is that I can speak every day to the issue of disability rights … There’s a big fight in it, but I think the narrative is changing. Like, as I said, one of the first things that Simon Harris did, I mean, appointed Taoiseach was announced that he was going to fully ratify the UNCRPD and scrap the green paper, and like they’re now beginning to realise, I think, particularly after the referendums, that there are votes in disability rights. And if they think there’s votes in it, they will respond. They will respond to the ask. Eventually, even if they’re drag kicking and screaming, they will eventually, they will eventually do the right thing. But we have to drag them kicking and screaming, and we will.”
He expressed gratitude to his fellow Trinity Senator Lynn Ruane, saying “She has been a very, very generous colleague and a very, very helpful mentor. She’s been very generous with her advice and support since I’ve been elected, and I actually found that personally to be a very meaningful thing. Like, she is an incredible public representative for Trinity graduates.”
Clonan is fighting for re-election this month, and had the following message for voters: “our university senators should be independent if you vote in a member of a political party, whether it be Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil, all you’re going to get is someone who’s going to rubber stamp government policy in the upper house. We need strong independent voices to challenge perceived thinking.”
“And if I’m not re-elected Eoin, I’ll be back outside the gates in January, February, protesting, you know, just like that. It just goes on.”
