Making the people sovereign

The estimable "think-tank for social change" is to publish an audit on democracy in Ireland shortly. The framework for evaluation will be one worked out by a Swedish institute and a few British academics. If it discovers the quality of our democracy is other than merely formulaic it will be disappointing.

Jean Jacques Rousseau had a robust idea of what democracy was about. He said it was an arrangement whereby the citizen was both subject and sovereign. Subject in being subject to the people, sovereign in being the people.

Rousseau had some daft ideas (for instance the "general will" idea, which seems to me to be loopy) but this idea of democracy seems to capture what it is about.

The problem is that nowadays, in Ireland and most other places, the people are subject okay, but only in a formal sense sovereign, for it is only in occasional trips to the polling booths that this sovereignty is exercised and then the choices are pretty meaningless.

Can we really claim to have a democracy because every now and again Fianna Fáil is removed from office? To mark their ballot paper, one two three, put it in a ballot box and leave it to the political class to sort things out until there is another election?

In no sense nowadays is there an engagement of the citizen in determining anything to do with policy or where we are going as a society or priorities that should apply in the allocation of societal resources - anything. Except every now and again there is a referendum on something or other, usually EU stuff about which citizens know almost nothing.

In two years' time there will be an election (if Fianna Fáil and the PDs do not fall out irreparably before then). The issues in that election will be whether the massive wealth we have created since 1992 should be distributed differently to how we have distributed it; the gigantic waste of public money on over-expenditure on a whole host of projects, notably roads; whether we should continue to facilitate the ongoing murderous campaign by the Americans in Iraq by letting them use Shannon as a pit stop; whether the national heritage should be sacrificed for roads; how to cater for the huge increase in population that will occur here in the next quarter of a century; what policies should we be promoting at the EU to make it more democratic and more fair; whether the EU should continue with enlargement; whether the police force should continue to be run by politicians and civil servants or by an independent authority.

Readers will have their own agendas and may reject what I propose, but the point I wish to make here is simply that there is a plethora of issues that will be relevant to that election, and the extent of our democratic involvement in them will simply be to vote for the present Government or for a different option.

Some people might like some of what the present Government is doing but not some of the other things it is doing. Equally, they like some of what Opposition parties propose and dislike some of their other proposals. But the blunt instrument of deciding on which candidates to vote for is all that our democracy allows.

And we wonder why there is such apathy? The fact is that we have created a new autocracy, a political class that takes decisions allegedly on our behalf. We have no involvement in these decisions. The only decision we have is in deciding the make-up of this political class on an occasional basis.

This isn't democracy. At least not as understood by Jean Jacques Rousseau.

I have a proposal.

As a means of involving a far larger cohort of citizens in the political process, I propose that nobody be entitled to stand for election if they have been elected twice previously and that there be Dáil elections every two years.

Yes, I know this will mean you won't have "experienced" politicos in the Dáil, that the civil servants will ride roughshod over these innocents abroad, that the "wealth" of experience built up by politicians who have been at it for years will be lost to the nation. That two-year parliaments will be awful for it will result in continuous election campaigns.

I know.

But it will mean that over, say, a 20-year period there will be some thousands of people who will have served in the Dáil, who will have had a direct engagement in public affairs. That would mean a lively public debate among serving Dáil members, past Dáil members and future Dáil members, all with some direct experience of involvement in decision-making. A new political literati.

It would mean radical changes to how we compose what we understand as the "government" - we have to end the ridiculous practice of having the likes of Micheál Martin, a schoolteacher by profession, or Mary Harney, a (what?) by profession, exercising executive authority over hugely complex corporations. We do not elect politicians to run departments, we elect them to shape policy and they have to get back to that and that alone.