IN THE story The Emperor's New Clothes, it is usually a little boy who says the emperor is wearing nothing.He is the one with no stake,no involvement in the culture of pretence, and so is able to describe what is there.
But the nakedness of Irish democracy is safe from such intrusions. For different reasons, neither young nor old can describe the inability of the system to respond to human needs, and so everyone flounders about in near despair.
Once again this week we have been hearing phrases like “sea change” and “new dawn” to describe the implications of last weekend’s elections. Mostly, such enthusiasm comes not from the young but from the veteran commentators afflicted by an inability to detach themselves from the practitioner’s logic that leads them once again to speak of the fine weave of the emperor’s tunic. Younger people, seeking hope, and not having been around to hear the same phrases used in 1982 or 1987 or 1990 or 1992, are likely to be taken in. Such delusion appears hopeful but really they postpone any possibility of understanding how badly our democracy works.
There is no new dawn and no sea change. Nobody but the wilfully blind could stand back from observing Irish politics
over the past while and declare that there is now a surge of enthusiasm for Fine Gael. People vote for Fine Gael because it is not Fianna Fáil. This was a win for Tweedledum at the expense of Tweedledee.
If there is an election, someone has to “win” it. Political analysts, because of their infatuation with mental arithmetic, always overlook the fact that ballot papers offer limited options, and that any form of expression outside of these will amount to a spoiled vote. Either you vote for one “side” or you vote against it and end up endorsing the other “side” by accident – or else you vote for someone on the margin.
And yet, afterwards, the analysts pore over the figures as though they must represent, by definition, an affirmation, which in turn bespeaks some new pattern or ideological subtext.
Although they frequently announce the end of civil war politics, analysts still largely adhere to the tribal model, in which sentiments are defined by a positive affinity with one or other “side”. In the past, political emotions tended to be tribal – intense loyalty based on the historical struggle for independence. But as this dissolved, a new set of emotions manifested, these tending to be individualistic and self-centred.
The political system is not as well adapted to these emotions as it was to the tribal kind. When you employ a ballot paper to express a “selfish” emotion, you often end up not actually voting “for” anyone, but, in a sense, “against” those who have displeased you. Often, people seeking to express anger at a government will vote for the least-worst alternative, or the one that will send the strongest signal of disapproval, though such an approach can achieve only a puny semblance of what they seek to say. The outcomes of such voting need to be read as default statements, characteristic of what they denounce rather than what they announce or approve.
And yet this disapproval manifests itself in the form of real live politicians with backsides well adapted to parliamentary upholstery.
Nearly 20 years ago, I made much of extolling the rise of single-issue Independents and community politics. Anyone looking at the figures over the past couple of decades might precipitately say that I was correct in my broad prediction of a decided shift away from the main parties. And last weekend’s results seemed to carry that message in spades. But when you stand a little further back, you realise that all this amounts to nothing. If you observe the Independents’ enclosure over time, it is obvious that, although the phenomenon appears to grow, the personnel constantly changes. Over the past couple of decades, Independents have come and gone, tending to either enter into private chauvinistic arrangements with governing parties or to flounder around in a fog of impotence for a few years before fading away. Not only has no coherent movement emerged from this phenomenon, but, right around Ireland, communities are still fighting the central bureaucracy for essential services, such as hospitals and transport facilities. Each new gesture by a particular community is headed off or defused, and the power, one way or another, eventually returns to the big parties, who always end up winning because they are able to sit and wait for the emotions to wane or shift.
The truth is that this model has not just failed but has reached the point of disgusting the electorate. No serious observer, scrutinising last week’s results could see most of them as other than default outcomes. They were not positive statements of anything, but snapshots in negative form, deriving from the darkest emotions. Nothing has been embraced. Nothing has been announced.
There was no sea change, no new dawn. There was nothing but an outpouring of grief, rage and, ultimately, impotence.