What’s the Big Idea? It’s time for the State to consider a real democracy

How many big ideas has the State had in its 92 years? By a big idea I mean a transformative concept, an ambitious project for radical change. By this criterion, the answer is at most four. And two of them failed. As the smoke clears from the 2008 bonfire of the vanities, the need for large-scale thinking is as obvious as its absence dangerous.

The State’s first big idea was the Gaelicisation of Ireland – economic autarky plus the revival of Irish as the main vernacular. It failed on both counts for the same reason – mass emigration of half the population to decidedly non-Gaelic places. The second big idea was the Whitaker/Lemass revolution of 1958 – abandoning the previous orthodoxies and opening Ireland up to multinational capital. It was broadly successful and brought vast changes in its wake – urbanisation, a more open society, the rise of feminism, EU membership and so on.

Free education

The third big idea was free second-level education in 1967. It was not a radical policy in itself – almost every western democracy had done it long before – but it had radical consequences for economic development, social mobility and cultural change. It, too, worked: Ireland went from being very poorly educated to having, by international standards, a very high proportion of graduates.

The fourth big idea was hyperglobalisation, the notion abroad in the Celtic Tiger era that Ireland could place itself at the cutting edge of global forces merely though the magical effects of cutting both taxes and regulation. It failed even more spectacularly than the opposite idea of Gaelicisation had done previously.

The two failed big ideas are not coming back. No one seriously thinks that Irish is going to displace English as the main vernacular. The Celtic Tiger orthodoxies of cutting taxes and regulations still have their true believers, but on any large scale they have become impossible. The vast burden of public debt has to be serviced and the EU is taking over bank regulation.

So that leaves the State still surfing the waves unleashed by the other two big ideas – opening the economy and expanding education. One is 56 years old; the other 47.

And they’re showing their age. Attracting transnational capital investment will always be important for a small, open economy. But as the single principle on which to run a country, its severe limitations have become increasingly obvious.

One is that it does not in itself guarantee sustainable prosperity – the indigenous economy is where the vast majority of Irish people work, and when it’s in trouble, no amount of Googles and Twitters will save those people. The other is that it has been overdependent on Ireland getting a free pass for tax deals that hurt other countries’ exchequers. That free pass is being gradually withdrawn.

Stalled revolution

Meanwhile, the educational revolution that began in 1967 has stalled. Educational advancement is not, in today’s world, a one-off event. It is a never-ending process: if you’re not improving, you’re going backwards compared to the best-performing countries. And Ireland really needs to be among those best performers. The stripping away of investment in education over the last six years has caused severe damage at all levels, from breakfast clubs for poorer primary school pupils to the international ranking of most Irish universities. Meanwhile, much of Ireland’s educational capital is being squandered by the disproportionately large extent of emigration among graduates.

So the State has had four big ideas, two of them failed and two of them are running out of energy. Don’t we need to talk about this?

Apparently not. It’s very difficult to find in the political system any sense of urgency about where the next transformative concept might come from, never mind what it might be. Political discourse is dominated by medical imagery – recovery, getting back on our feet – that implies a return to past. The necessary conversation, on the other hand, is about the future.

Next big idea

Perhaps this absence tells us something useful. The next big idea is not going to come from the top down, from a brilliant public servant like Ken Whitaker in 1958 or a rogue minister like Donogh O’Malley who cut through the caution of the system and announced free education in 1967. That kind of top-down State has become the source of problems, not of solutions – its command-and-control technocratic ethos has squeezed the life out of our democracy. It has lost the authority to articulate a bold departure and create a sufficient consensus to make it happen.

Which suggests in turn that the next big idea might be democracy itself – a real, vibrant, engaged, republican democracy that is capable of using the energies and ideas – social, political, economic – of all its citizens. As a small, relatively privileged, well-educated society with serious problems to face, Ireland could and should be a great testing ground for new ways of doing democracy in the 21st century. This is not an abstract demand – the status quo looks increasingly incapable of holding together. The evidence is piling up that if the people don’t own the system, they’ll break it.