Madam, – Among the few concrete measures advocated in your series on Renewing the Republic, the most notable so far has been more local control over local affairs. It was urged by Fiach Mac Conghail (Opinion, March 15th), Nuala O’Connor (March 17th) and Shane Fitzgerald (March 19th). More formally expressed, it would mean real self-government by regions and districts with central government attending to national dimensions and affairs. This would activate for government unused human resources of the nation and make the Republic a normal European state.
Those writers may not be of an age to know that from the late 1960s to the early 1980s there was a considerable movement arguing for this fundamental renewal. Initiated by Charles McCarthy with his book The Distasteful Challenge, the movement was led by Tom Barrington, founder and director of the Institute of Public Administration.
In Barrington's books From Big Government to Local Governmentand The Irish Administrative Systemhe couched his concrete proposals in an ardent philosophical humanism. One review of the latter book described it accurately as "the most important book published in Ireland in the last 50 years". My own Sketches of the New Ireland, with maps illustrating proposed regions and districts (including 26 districts in Greater Dublin), sold 3,000 copies.
The Constitution Club was for a time a focus of this movement, with Roy Johnston and Dónal Ó Brolcháin contributing papers. Sinn Féin with its radically decentralising Éire Nua programme played its part.
The sobering fact for the hopes of those three contributors to your Renewal series is that this considerable movement failed. A couple of sympathetic ministers were successfully resisted by the central bureaucracy, and no section of the centralised national mass media supported the widely disseminated proposals. As Mr McCarthy had accurately intimated in the title of his book, the “challenge” of implementing real self-government in the Republic was “distasteful” to those two Dublin powers.
I fear that today the same would be the case and that our nationally paralysing system of government will remain an anomaly in Europe. – Yours, etc.