Irish Political Culture Is Ill-Suited to the Times

 It would be nice if the state were to take stock and reset some dials when the pandemic finally runs its course. The state is nearly one hundred years old. The circumstances that prevailed in 1922 do not prevail now. This is a different Ireland, and it needs a different regulatory structure.

The Irish Free State was born from an armed revolution that led to civil war. The traces of that violent birth remain in our institutions. The first governments of the Free State were about consolidating that state against enemies, to borrow a phrase from the USA, both foreign and domestic. Therefore, the balance tilted more towards the institution than the citizen whenever the interests of the two competed.

The state is now as stable as a state can be. The IRA are gone. The state is protected by the European Super State that is currently being born, and that European Super State may be a better bet than China for replacing the USA as the greatest power in the world in a generation or two.

As such, we should now be in a position of sufficient maturity to loosen some of the over-tight bonds, and in a position of sufficient wisdom born from experience, between the financial crash and the pandemic, to see the need for loosening those bonds.

Consider the case of judging the judges. Ireland’s laws regarding freedom of speech are highly restrictive. This restriction acts as a halter on the media’s ability to tell stories fully, which in turn comforts the strong and afflicts the weak.

We’ve seen it in the past fortnight concerning Golfgate and Mr Justice Wolfe. The current issue of The Phoenix details the twenty-year struggle to have a judicial council appointed, a twenty-year struggle that has yet to leave the starting gate. Not good enough.  This needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency.

Judicial accountability is just one of a number of major areas of Irish public life that are not scrutinised. The property market and the meat-factory industry are two obvious cases. The communal living scheme is eerily reminiscent of the boom in building two-bedroom apartments with parking for one car of the early 2000s. The two-bedroom apartment is the most profitable type of building for a developer. It is the least useful for families looking for homes. Are we going to make the same mistakes again? If not, what’s going to stop us?

As for the meat factories, the special treatment given to the cause of keeping schools open during the pandemic is certainly understandable, if perhaps not entirely wise. The special treatment afforded the meat factories makes no sense whatsoever. The special treatment is so odd that it resulted in Michael McDowell and Sinn Féin being on the same side of the argument, not something that occurs very often. What’s going on, and why is it going on? A deafening silence from Institutional Ireland.

One of the flaws in Irish political culture is the culture’s emphasis on politics and lack of emphasis on governance. As a people, we revel in stories about strokes and politicians slipping blades between each other’s ribs. Governance – whether the bins should be collected at the start or the end of a week; how best to distribute services, by geography or population; how best to distribute taxes; how best to educate children; how to deal with the left-behind – all these questions bore us rigid. Ireland expects somebody else to worry about that stuff. The part of democracy that demands the sovereign people take responsibility for these decisions is a penny that has yet to drop with the Irish nation.

Perhaps it will drop now. One of the effects of the pandemic is that the nation’s indifference to the spectacular levels of public-service waste is coming home to roost. Why does Ireland lack acute bed capacity? Because acute bed capacity has never been an issue in Irish politics. Every party throws money at the HSE and hopes a miracle will result. They are incapable of doing anything else. Utterly out of their depth.

When Norma Foley announced the balls-up in the Leaving Cert results, who was really surprised? We might not have said it aloud, but nobody really expected that automated system to work. The government got away with it by giving everyone whatever course they wanted. If that has negative consequences, they’ll happen on someone else’s watch, a double-result on any Irish politician’s scorecard.

The most important thing to take from all of this is that it’s not the politician’s fault. It’s out fault for electing them. These are not colonial governors sent from London. These are ourselves, doing things as we, the sovereign people, would have them done.

Therefore, the onus is on the people to change their taste in politics. Politics has to become boring, an accountants’ game of what did you say you’d do, what did you do, how much did it cost, why did it happen, why didn’t it happen and how much did it all cost? The electoral system will have to change too, as it’s inclined to prioritise local over national needs. This will reduce the fun of election counts, but reader, look on the bright side. Maybe you’ll be able to go for a pint again. Wouldn’t that be worth it?

What Are, Aren't, and Should Be Major Issues in the Election

Saturday will be, we are told, a "change" election, after which things will never be the same again. This is not the country’s first "change" election. The post-bailout 2011 election was a change election. So was the 1997 Deep Bertie election, and the Spring Tide election of 1992, and the Rise of the PDs in 1987. We could go on back to the 1920s, always finding the repeating pattern of things changing in order that they may remain the same, like in that Italian novel.

The PDs won fourteen seats in 1987. The Labour Party won more than twice as many in 1992. Those are historical elections now; is it possible that it is the children of those who voted PD in 1987 and Labour in 1992 who are now going to vote Green and/or Sinn Féin?

For a country that so enjoys an election, we seem unusually poor at documenting and/or analysing our politics. Why have we had so many change elections in the past thirty years?

Some people are claiming that that the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael duopoly is finally over. They said that in 1987 too. Like the life of novelist Mark Twain or the fate of the Irish language, reports of the duopoly’s demise have been premature before.

Why, though? Why is that? Why are there these sudden lurches among the electorate, from the right-wing PDs to the softish-left social democrats of Labour to the – to borrow a phrase from Seán Lemass about the origins of his own party – slightly-constitutional Shinners?

Don’t forget, there is nobody more surprised at this Shinner surge – if it is a surge, and not another false dawn – than the Shinners themselves. Up until ten days ago, Sinn Féin were about consolidating the seats they hold, and trying to shore up leaks. Now they’re getting their ears boxed in the media for not running enough candidates, when one month ago it looked like they might be running too many.

It’s a cliche of politics to talk about a gap between the elected and the elected, between the people and the elite. But my goodness, we had a Dáil declaring a climate emergency at the same time as rural Ireland was getting ready to picket meat factories and hold up traffic in Dublin over the destruction of a way of life that some feel the Green Party are only interesting in accelerating.

There used to be a tradition of match-making in Ireland. Were any matched couples such strangers to each other as the current elected and the current electorate?

What even is it that we do when do we go to vote? It’s not something that we really document. The weight of scholarly work on Irish politics seems to have been a series of laments and jeremiads about how awful it was that Irish politics did not operate along a left-right divide, thus shaming Irish academics when they attended conferences (in such socialist states as East Germany, Cuba and the USSR, funnily enough). Would it not have made more sense to document politics as they were, rather than as academics would have had them be?

Are we better at understanding Irish politics now, or worse? Where is the great study, for instance, in the rise of the Independents in recent years? Nineteen independents were elected to the 32nd Dáil. There’s a good chance that number will be higher after Saturday and whenever the Tipperary election is finally held.

What does a vote for an independent say about that independent’s voters’ views on how the country should be governed? Why does a TD who was voted unfit for office by his fellow parliamentarians continue to top the poll in his own constituency?

Whose job is it to tease these issues out? It is the media’s job to tease these issues out. Why don’t the media tease these issues out? The media defence is that these issues are not teased out because the public isn’t interested in teasing them out – that the public likes sausages but cares little about how sausages are made.

To which there are two responses. The first is that distinguishing between the public interest and what the public is interested in is meant to be a cardinal concern of a responsible media, not least when the primary media outlet, RTÉ, is a public-service broadcaster.

The other response is that the media has no problem in the world in featuring issues about which the public could care less, the recent climate emergency business being a case in point. Which is more important? Why not devote even half of the resources devoted to climate issues to electoral reform issues? It doesn’t make sense.

And here’s what makes least sense of all. This is another change election. The most seismic election in the history of this, or any other, state was in 2011.

Fianna Fáil, the party that ruled the state from three of every four years of the state’s existence, went from seventy-one seats to twenty as an outraged and furious electorate blamed them for everything that had gone wrong in the country since the 2008 global financial crash.

And now, nine years later, Fianna Fáil will be back in power. They won’t have seventy-one seats, but they look good for sixty, give or take. How has that happened? Was the crash as bad as it was made out to be? If it wasn’t, why did the people get the impression that it was?

Either the media made fools of themselves by saying the crash was going to be far worse than it was, or else Ireland, that dear little island of green, has pulled off a bigger economic miracle than West Germany pulled off in the 1950s. Which is it? How did it happen? Who is to praise? Who is to blame? And where do I go to read about it?

You may think the answers to these questions – just how bad was the crash? How did we recover? Have we recovered at all, or are we simply on the batter again and there’s an even worse hangover waiting around the turn? - would be front and centre in the election campaign, with politicians and pundits making cases pro and con different interpretations of recent history.

You would be wrong. These have not been issues in the campaign. At all. And it’s going to be change elections all the way to the horizon and the nation going around in ever-decreasing circles until we start asking ourselves these questions, and paying attention to the answers.

Tribes and Chieftains Are the Only Things That Count in Irish Politics

An article in yesterday’s Irish Times made a bold prediction about a change in direction of Irish politics:

Political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump not only redefined what their party stood for but redrew the lines of political competition in their countries.
A Leo Varadkar leadership of Fine Gael potentially presents a similar realignment of the Irish political system in a way that none of the other declared or potential candidates at this point appears to offer.

There is an elephant in the room here, tapping its foot impatiently.

The elephant is the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that leadership or ideology matters a hill of beans in an Irish general election. There are no general elections in Ireland; there are forty-something local elections, depending on the constituency count, with a government being formed as an afterthought to those individual local wars.

Two things matter in Irish elections – tribes and chieftains. Anything else is either a bell or a whistle.

Discussing the presence of Jim O’Callaghan and Stephen Donnelly on the current Fianna Fáil front bench, the author makes a point based on “my experience in the UK.” Experience in the UK is as much in Irish politics as experience on Mars, the Red Planet. Irish elections are utterly different from British elections.

The British House of Commons has 650 seats. There are four Independents among those 650 MPs, three of whom were elected on party tickets and either resigned or lost their party whips. The only Independent elected as an Independent in the 650 constituencies is Lady Sylvia Hermon, MP for South Down.

Dáil Éireann has 158 seats currently. Fourteen of those seats were won by Independent Candidates, possibly more depending on how exactly you count them (are the Independent Alliance or Independents 4 Change “Independent”?). This is a situation unthinkable in the British system, but it is par for the course in Ireland. Ireland has a completely different way of doing things. Completely different.

Those fourteen Independents got two hundred and fifty thousand votes in the last election. The Labour Party, worried about the “face on the poster,” changed leader after the 2014 local elections and ended up with 140,000 votes, slightly better than half that of the Independents, and with less than a third of the Independents’ seats.

So the crystal clear lesson here is that it doesn’t matter if it’s Leo Varadkar’s, Simon Coveney’s or JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy’s face on the poster. Irish elections are local elections for local people. Irish governments are formed by backroom deals on “issues” like Waterford Hospital, Stepaside Garda Station and flood barriers in Athlone, and have nothing on God’s green earth to do with “liberalism, globalism, equality of opportunity, enterprise and greater personal liberty and responsibility.”

And this is exactly the way the people like it. The system is set up to reward our lesser angels, and the current crises in the HSE, the Guards and the absence of any sort of contingency planning for Brexit is the result. The boys at home get sorted no matter what, and let the country take her chances with what’s left.

Irish Politics - Leaning Left, or Keeling Over?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

There’s nothing like seeing ourselves as others see us to find out who we really are. As such, the New York Times’ report on Saturday evening about our elections is particularly interesting.

“Ireland has taken a decisive step to the left in local and European elections,” reported the New York Times, going on to say “early returns on Saturday showed that the big winners were Sinn Féin, formerly the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, and Socialist independent candidates.”

And when you read that you have to suddenly stop and say: is that what we’ve just done? Is that what’s going on here? Is Ireland, nearly one hundred years after independence, going to have its first-ever left-wing Government come the next general election? Has the wheel turned full circle for Sinn Féin?

Certainly, the fact that Sinn Féin is less and less toxic to the electorate with each passing election is clear as a bell. But it does not necessarily then follow that Leo Varadkar is correct when he suggested on Saturday that the next general election will be a two-horse race between Fine Gael and Sinn Féin. There are more tea-leaves swirling around than that.

Equally, the rise of the socialist independents isn’t entirely robust as a theory. Catherine Murphy and John Halligan, both late of the Workers’ Party and both current Technical Group TDs, welcomed the rise of the independents on RTÉ as if it had something to do with them. But does it have something to do with them? Is there a red tide rising in Ireland, or is something else going on?

The success of Murphy and Halligan’s fellow Technical Group TD and future MEP if press-time polling is to trusted, Luke “Ming” Flanagan, is the most spectacular result of the election. But Ming isn’t like any other politician – the national media likes to group him with Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, but Ming is infinitely smarter than Wallace and not as ideologically tied up as Daly.

Luke Flanagan’s campaign was a textbook example of how to get elected in modern-day Ireland. He didn’t put a foot wrong in any of it. Flanagan spent the first week or ten days of the election running in the five and ten kilometre races that are all over the country now. Why? Flanagan’s biggest image problem in this constituency is that he’s a good-for-nothing layabout stoner, and he conquered that immediately by running the races and proving himself healthy as a trout. Genius.

Flanagan’s second, and no less inspired, tactic in the campaign was to loosely ally with other independents who were running in the locals. They got a slice of Flanagan’s charisma, of which he has buckets, while he got his leaflets distributed.

What was that worth? Think of it this way. On his Facebook page on April 16th, Flanagan thanked an independent candidate in Athlone for taking seven thousand leaflets to distribute. You know those bales of paper that you can buy in the supermarket for your printer at home? Seven thousand leaflets is fourteen of those bales, and would cost €4,200 to post. Genius.

But is Ming the exception or the rule? Did people vote for Luke Flanagan because he’s perceived as left-wing, or because they can’t help but like the man? Did people vote for Sinn Féin because Sinn Féin are left wing or because the anniversary of the 1916 Rising, the source and origin of the state itself, is looming and Sinn Féin seems to be the only party that wants to celebrate it, rather than hide it in some bizarre stew that also includes Passchendaele, Ypres and the sinking of the Lusitania?

It got very little coverage overall because it was a skirmish on the side of the great battles of the local and European elections, but the real soul of Irish politics could be seen in the Longford-Westmeath by-election. There were nine candidates on the ballot, of whom eight were from Westmeath and just one from Longford.

That single Longford candidate, an independent (of course) called James Morgan, entered the race late on a platform of “A Vote for Morgan is a Vote for Longford.” He polled 5,959 votes on the first count, of which 5,900 are unlikely to have come from Westmeath.

And that’s Irish politics in the nutshell. We pretend elections are about issues, but they’re not. Not really. Left/right, pro/anti Europe don’t matter a hill of beans. Irish elections are about defending the home patch because the entire culture has been set up that way for generations.

For the people of Longford to have put merit over geography is like the unilateral disarmament theory during the cold war. It seems noble, but you’re only inviting someone who isn’t noble to blow you away to Hell. Everything about the Irish system of elections is set up to ensure the continuance of this parish pump culture, where the back yard is more important than the nation.

Why are chronically ill children being denied medical cards? Why has something terribly rotten at the heart of the Garda Síochána been allowed to fester unchecked? Why will we be paying for water that we can’t even see through, to say nothing of drink?

Because the Irish political system makes fighting over whether Ballyglenna or Ballyknock loses its post office more important than the health of the nation’s children, the policing of the state, or access to clean water.

Is Ireland leaning to the left? Only insofar as we’ve decided to chase our own tails anti-clockwise for a change. Above anything else, Ireland needs reform of its political culture to elect a new type of politician and bury civil war politics for once and for all. It then needs comprehensive public service reform so it can raise sufficient taxes to protect the vulnerable, something it cannot do currently in the culture of wanton waste.

It will take twenty-five or thirty years for these things to come to pass. But until they do, until we have a functional democratic system instead of one ruled by clientelism, favoritism and nepotism, all the blood shed for Irish freedom will have been shed for nothing. Every precious drop of it.