Democracy depends on healthy political parties

The establishment of new political parties is a prospect which should be welcomed by all who cherish democracy. Politics ultimately involves a clash of ideas and our democratic system can only function when the greatest possible choice is available to the electorate.

Recent opinion polls have been interpreted as evidence that voters are turning away from parties to embrace Independents, with Shane Ross TD going as far as to say that political parties as a concept are “discredited entities”. Anyone who truly believes this should cast a cold eye on parliaments which have just one party, or those which have none. China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Oman are hardly countries whose democratic credentials we would wish to emulate.

Any future government which relied on a loose alliance of Independents would throw Irish democracy back to a situation like that that obtained in early 19th-century Britain, when no formal parties existed and government by shifting factions of MPs led to near permanent instability. Since individual parliamentarians had no allegiance other than to their own constituencies, governments had to resort to patronage and pork-barrel back-scratching on an industrial scale to secure majorities for legislation. We had a taste of this in Ireland when a small group of Independent TDs propped up recent Fianna Fáil governments. Should we really go down this road again?

Given all that has happened over the past six years some recoil from political parties is understandable. But, as the late Prof Peter Mair observed, there has been an equal recoil effect by the political establishment away from the grassroots of their own parties and from the electorate itself.

Parties are no longer the community-based cauldrons of ideas which they once were as their elected leaders retreat into Leinster House and the institutions of Government. The generation of policy has increasingly been farmed out to focus groups, committees of independent “experts” and elitist and unrepresentative bodies such as the Constitutional Convention, all of which have been cleansed of partisan influence.

This has led to a serious erosion of the influence which citizens can have on national policy through involvement in political parties, and has ultimately greatly weakened the role of the Dáil itself. It’s almost as if politics is too important to be left to democratically elected politicians!

False competition

As a result, competition between all parties has become increasingly false, with diversity of thought in the Dáil eliminated by the odious party whip and ideological differences eventually fading away in the face of a shared cross-party ambition for office. Voters have reacted to this groupthink by switching off in their droves.

One way to address this stagnation in our party system is to inject new blood, new ideas, and more competition to keep the existing parties on their toes. For that reason, it is highly regrettable that the Government has implemented a number of measures which greatly restrict that possibility.

The ban on corporate donations and the cuts to direct State funding to political parties in line with other cuts to exchequer spending had widespread public support. However, the simultaneous reduction by 61 per cent of the limits for declared donations to political parties by private citizens and the 50 per cent cuts to remaining State funding threatened against parties which fail to adhere to strict gender quotas are far more difficult to justify.

Democracy needs to be resourced somehow and these direct attacks on the ability of political parties to fund themselves in a transparent manner only serve to weaken existing parties and greatly hinder the prospects of any new ones.

These measures also illustrate the policy disconnect that exists between political leaders and their own grassroots, since they did not appear in the election manifestoes of either Government party or in the Programme for Government. Instead, they were generated by Ministers and civil servants behind the closed doors of their departments without any democratic endorsement whatsoever and rammed through the Dáil using the whip.

This kind of top-down government is not what people voted for in 2011, and it has to change.

Factional interests

Political parties are the very essence of a mature democracy, not merely an optional appendage of it.

Those who advocate replacing them with Independents seem to labour under a mistaken view that the Dáil is an assembly of delegates representing 166 competing factional interests, when in fact, according to our Constitution, it is a “National Parliament” representing the nation as a whole.

The only way to properly gauge the will of the nation is through coherent and broadly based political parties that act, firstly, as an electoral vehicle through which specific policies can obtain a direct mandate from the people, and secondly as a parliamentary vehicle through which these policies can pass into law.

For that reason the leaders of all parties, old and new, urgently need to engage with their own grassroots and with the wider electorate to give politics and political parties back to the people and to prove that our multiparty democracy is the best means of securing political stability into the future.

Barry Walsh is vice chairman of the Fine Gael executive council and was president of Young Fine Gael from 2007 to 2010. He writes here in a personal capacity.