A Three-Point-Plan for the Coming Election

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Houses of Oireachtas reconvene this day week, the fifteenth of September. A leading bookmaker is currently laying odds of Burlington Bertie, 100/30, that there will be an election this year. That is a very tempting price.

We are currently in the run-up to the Budget and, as is the time-honoured tradition with these things, ministers are flying flags to protect their own departmental budgets. There’s nothing unusual in that.

What is unusual this time around is that the Labour Party have mandated a new leader to make a stronger Labour case at the cabinet table while Fine Gael continue to hold the austerity line. Eventually, something’s got to give.

Neither side wants an election, but sometimes these things take on a momentum of their own and, once the snowball starts rolling down the hill, there’s no real way to stop it.

If there is to be an election, this column is happy to announce one vote for hire in the next general election. Whatever party comes closest to the following list of demands is the party most worthy of your correspondent’s favour when exercising his democratic franchise.

Reform of the Electoral System
Everybody talks about reform, but if that talking doesn’t contain a practical suggestion it’s just so much air. Commissions to see if Ireland should lower the voting age to sixteen are all hooey. Platitudes. Deckchairs on the Titanic.

Real reform is something that shakes up the political system, and ours is a system that is badly in need of shaking up. We can’t object to Europe taking over the powers of our national parliament when our own national parliament is, for want of a better phrase, a joke shop.

A parliament exists to hold a government to account. The Dáil does no such thing. The TDs obey the party whip, which means that Ireland is an oligarchy as much as it’s a democracy – the Taoiseach of the day takes advice from his unelected but nicely remunerated advisers, and the sheep bleat their support in the chamber.

Why is this so? This is so because the Irish nation prioritises the local over the national interest. Why would we do that? Because the electoral system forces us to do that.

For example: suppose there are two candidates for election. One is someone who speaks well, understands the economy and has a vision for the future. The other is someone who doesn’t care one way or the other about visions, but will pull every string going to fix the main road into town.

If the first person gets elected, nothing changes. He or she is full of great ideas but, as discussed earlier, you’re as well off writing to Santa about them as speaking in the Dáil, because nobody is listening in the Dáil.

If the second person gets elected, nothing changes at the national level either, but you do have a chance of getting that road tarred. A simple choice for anyone who can tell the difference between half a loaf and no bread.

If the electoral system is changed, we can then change the type of politician we elect, and the new politicians can then make more radical changes to the system of Government. But without that first step, nothing changes at all. This column’s preference would be for a single-seat constituency supplemented by a list system of elections, but I’m not dogmatic about it. So long as the politicians realise a change of system is the difference between getting elected and not, that’s the main thing.

Deflating the Dublin Housing Market Bubble
How can you have a housing shortage in a city that is surrounded by ghost estates? It makes no sense, yet this is what we’re being told to believe about housing in Dublin. We’ve spent the past five years watching TV documentaries about ghost estates, and now we’re expected to believe there’s a housing shortage and we need to build, build, build?

Average house prices in Dublin are rising by six thousand Euro a month. There is no way that is not a bubble. No way. Speculator cash is driving up the price of houses, and it’s being facilitated by the National Assets Management Agency, NAMA. NAMA’s remit is to get the best price it can for the assets on its books, and NAMA is supremely indifferent to whether there’s a bubble there or not. Managing the economy isn’t NAMA’s concern.

Managing the economy is, in fact, the Government’s concern. Vote for a party at the next election who will make deflating the bubble a priority. The crash is only five years’ distant – surely we haven’t forgotten that lesson already?

Decentralisation
One of the reasons that Dublin currently has a housing market bubble is because, post-recession, the Government has abandoned all pretence at treating all regions equally. Right now, Government policy centres on developing the capital as a hub for foreign direct investment, and letting the regions go whistle.

The theory behind the policy is that Dublin has to compete with other cities of the world like London, New York, Mumbai and Amsterdam in being attractive to a globalised workforce, and it is the duty of the rest of the country to pull on the green jersey and get behind the capital.

The theory is deeply flawed. Foreign direct investment is a false god. Indigenous industry will always be more reliable than foreign direct investment, for two reasons. Firstly, being indigenous means the company is less likely to move away to somewhere cheaper. Secondly, if one indigenous company folds, it doesn’t take the whole industry with it. All our eggs will not be in one basket.

Again, there is no rule that says Ireland can only look to foreign direct investment for its development. This is the information age – the absence of resources and infrastructure don’t hamper us anymore. We need electric power, computers and good broadband. Once we have that, we are only limited by our imagination and bravery.

Fine Gael won their greatest-ever number of seats in the last election on the back of a five-point-plan. Here’s a three-point-plan that the voters should use to decide the next government – electoral reform, financial prudence, and decentralisation. Are they really too much to ask?

Why Shouldn't the Rest of the Country Have a Say About the Dublin Mayor?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

There is a vote taking place this Monday night that directly affects the people of every county in Ireland, but the vote will be held in Dublin alone. Three of the four Dublin local councils are voting on whether nor not a plebiscite should be held in the city to see if Dublin should have a Mayor with powers outside of the national system. Dublin City Council has already backed the proposal 50-0, with one abstention.

The argument is that a directly-elected Mayor with considerably enhanced powers would make Dublin, the capital city of Ireland, even more competitive in attracting foreign direct investment. If the capital is better off, we’re all better off.

But reader, is this true? Proposers of the Dublin Super-Mayor say that Dublin is in competition with other cities, rather than the rest of the country. But the funds fast-tracked into Dublin to power the Super-Mayoralty would not be coming from other cities, would they? No; they would be coming from the same place they’ve always come. If the IDA-Dublin is competing against the IDA-Rest-of-Ireland, who do you think is going to win?

In the past fifteen to twenty years, Dublin has leeched people from everywhere else on the island, all drained from the south, the east and the north, slowly but inevitably funneled into the capital. Is that good for Ireland? Is it even good for Dublin?

People will tell you that this is just the natural march of progress. That nobody put a gun to these people’s heads, they’ve come to Dublin of their own free wills and they’re getting on just fine, thank you very much. And that’s true. Nobody put a gun to anyone’s head to move to Dublin. But to describe Dublin’s exponential development as inevitable simply isn’t true.

When it comes to planning and building in this country, you can’t just do what you like. You have to fill out forms and pay fees and hope your plans fit in with the general plan. You can’t move to Dublin just because you want to; the Government planners are already expecting you. Your moving to Dublin was all part of a plan on their part.

Equally, when foreign companies come to Dublin to invest and set up shop, they have to be allowed to do so. The final choice will always be their own, of course, but is it too much to ask that the Government of the day should accept its responsibility to all of the country, and not just the capital?

A Government for all of the country could have noted the coming of the multi-nationals when the corporation tax exemption was introduced. And they could then have made plans that, as the companies came, some would be sent to Cork, and some to Limerick, and some to Galway, and so on. These regional centres would grow, and then satellites around those centres could grow too, in a marvellous rising tide that would lift all boats.

But that wasn’t what happened, was it? It was decided that the country, in the form of its people, could all be crammed into Dublin, into two-bed apartments with one parking space or else vast, sprawling, soulless estates on the edge of the city. If that left the migrants’ own native places deserted and empty, well, such is the price of progress.

The fact this movement of people and subsequent building boom all occurred at a time of widespread planning corruption in Dublin Corporation is, of course, entirely coincidental.

By the time the Government did turn its attentions to the regions, it was too late. The only attempt at decentralization was to split up Government Departments, which is like trying to lose weight by chopping off a limb. You lose weight alright, but you’ll have entirely missed the point of the exercise.

The multinationals are embedded in Dublin now, and are going nowhere. If there were to be placed around the country, the time was at the start. Right now, they exist in their own ecosystem. As well as our freckles and laughter and lovely red hair, one of the reasons that multinationals want to locate in Dublin is because of the other multinationals here already.

Twitter covet people working in Google and Facebook, Facebook covets the Twitter coders and so on. If you want someone to move from their current job to yours, having them move house as well is an extra fence to jump. The current situation, of the “best and brightest” all squirrelled into Dublin, suits the multinationals very well, thank you. As for the regions – well, that’s the Government’s problem, isn’t it?

The deep unhappiness in rural Ireland at the moment over pylons and windfarms might not be so much to do with the things themselves as with a ruling elite that seems at a greater and greater distance from ordinary people. The fact that the current Taoiseach is himself one of the most personable of men, and a Mayoman to boot, just adds to the confusion.

When the United States were founded, they built an entirely new capital, Washington DC, to make a new beginning for the new country. Brazil moved its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in 1960, in part because they were concerned about over-population in Rio and under-population in the rest of country.

The USA and Brazil are considerably bigger than Ireland of course, but it is a pity that the founders of the state didn’t consider moving the capital. Looking back, the 1916 Generation were ill-prepared for winning the war, and never really knew what they were doing, other than trying to survive. And as such, to maintain the status quo was the easier option.

But the easier option isn’t always the best. Ireland has been ruled from Dublin since the early 13th Century, when Dublin Castle was built. Maybe breaking that lineage could have done something to create the new start that a new nation needed. But it didn’t happen, and still Dublin dominates the country. Does the capital city lead the nation, or feed off it?