Sir, – In "What's the big idea? It's time for the State to consider a real democracy" (Opinion & Analysis, November 18th), Fintan O'Toole suggests that the State should consider real democracy. Yet at no stage does he articulate how this "real democracy" would be delivered and what specific aspects of the current process he would change and how he would change them.
There are failings in the current process, but the primary failing has been in how the system has been used by the voters to make choices that they then deny all responsibility for. We hear much of the failure of the political system to curb the mistakes of the governments from 1997 to 2011 yet little about the failure of the electorate to deliver any electoral admonishment to those same governments.
He says that we should have “a real, vibrant, engaged, republican democracy that is capable of using the energies and ideas – social, political, economic – of all its citizens”. As a road map to how this “real democracy” would be achieved, this is as much use as a faded black-and-white picture of an unidentified beach is in planning a summer holiday.
Democracy is the means by which we can exercise the power to make choices about our present and future as a nation and take the responsibility to live with the consequences of them and to learn from them. We have democracy; what we lack are enough people who are interested in exercising it, in stretching it to its full potential, to make it work for the nation and not just themselves. – Yours, etc,
DANIEL K SULLIVAN,
Dublin 2.
Sir, – The Céifin Centre has been promoting debate on values-led change since 1998, and in this time it has published papers from 80 speakers, national and international. As founder and chairman of the centre, I want to concur with Fintan O’Toole’s suggestion that the next big idea needed to transform Ireland might be democracy itself.
The current protests are clearly not just about Irish Water. They are more about a people who have had enough of the failures of top-down leadership. These amount to a systemic failure which we can see not just in the present controversy, but in our hospitals, in our banks and in the church.
Surely the time has come for a movement that will facilitate local leadership to drive the next, necessary transformation that Irish society so clearly needs. As Mr O’Toole so rightly says, “The evidence is piling up that if the people don’t own the system, they’ll break it.” – Yours, etc,
Fr HARRY BOHAN,
Chairman,
The Céifin Centre
for Values-Led Change,
Drumgeely Hill,
Shannon,
Co Clare.