OPINION:Parliament is powerless to hold the government accountable for what it does and decides, writes VINCENT BROWNE.
FRIDAY’S ELECTIONS happen at a moment of crisis in Ireland, crisis in the economy, crisis in society and crisis in our political system. In other circumstances the elections could be transformative; in these circumstances the elections will make no difference at all.
Nothing will change. Maybe Brian Cowen will be propelled from the position of Taoiseach but another Fianna Fáil leader would make no difference. A change of government would present an array of different faces but the same policies. Nothing will change in Europe as a consequence of these elections. Nothing will change in local government either.
No matter what the people want now, it will be the same as before, because our political system freezes politics and freezes the possibility of change in the frozen political system. No party in office will concede a meaningful role to our parliament, parliament will remain the creature of the government of the day, powerless to hold the government accountable for what it does and decides. The party whipping system will ensure that.
Just note how irrelevant our parliament was to the scandalous indemnity deal done in June 2002 with the religious orders – yes the Committee of Public Accounts did hold hearings later and published a report but by then the damage was done. And note how irrelevant parliament has been on the banking crisis, again a few hearings but no participation in the decisions that may prove calamitous.
The electoral system forces choice between tweedledee and tweedledee, even the tweedledum is no longer an option (I am grateful to somebody working in the public service for this observation). There is no difference at all between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, aside from the possibility that Fine Gael may be marginally less incompetent than Fianna Fáil (I thought vice versa until the Nama debacle). Fine Gael competed on the policies that brought us ruin – cuts in personal taxation, reliance on transactional taxes and measures to inflate the property boom even more. (In the last election Fine Gael promised cuts in stamp duty and in income taxes.)
Labour is no different. It was the first in the last general election campaign to promise more tax cuts and it was keen to give further boosts to the property market via favouring the first-time buyers and otherwise.
Politics is about jobs. Jobs, not for the unemployed, but for the actual and would-be ministers and ministers of state. It is not about changing society, not about changing the political system. Almost nothing at all about the kind of society we should have or the kind of society people want.
We will still have one of the most unequal societies in Europe, democracy will still be largely a sham, the big boys will remain big boys although with a little shuffling, a shuffling which will happen one way or another. Some will be paid massive salaries which will remain largely untaxed. Others will live in relative penury. And the “relative” here matters hugely.
A book that has been described as "transformative" by several reviewers, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, by British academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, (reviewed here several months ago by Neil Crowley), shows how income and wealth inequality causes dysfunctional societies, which are more violent, more crime-prone, where the incidence of mental illness is higher and where premature death is much more prevalent. We have known since the publication of Inequality in Mortalitiesby the Institute of Public Health in 2002 how, directly because of inequality, there are more than 5,000 premature deaths annually.
And yet, in spite of that staggering revelation, the issue of inequality is hardly addressed at all and never by any of the major political parties – Liz McManus is the only politician of those parties ever to have referred to the report. It is inequality that matters, not poverty, as The Spirit Levelshows vividly, drawing on a vast range of sociological research. The pecking order becomes the driver of respect and disrespect and, by extension, the driver of anxiety, psychological disturbance, mental illness, violence, crime and ill health generally.
The Spirit Levelshows how very much more equal societies, such as Japan, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, have far lower rates of homicides, lower levels of crime, of teenage pregnancies, but greater longevity. While the unequal societies, such as the USA, Portugal, the UK, Australia and Ireland have higher rates of mental illness, of incarceration, of unhappiness. The book shows that the more equal societies are, the more everyoneis better off.
There is a growing appreciation of how dysfunctional society became during the era of the Celtic Tiger and the elections might have been a time to change that. But nothing will change, and we are inviting a more painful convulsion at some future time.