NEWTON'S OPTIC:Stormont's hard-won wisdom offers the perfect blueprint
HERE IN Northern Ireland we have enjoyed some recent success in cobbling together unlikely coalitions. What can Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore learn from Stormont’s hard-won power-sharing wisdom?
The first thing both men must address is the offensive title of “Tánaiste”. This implies a hierarchy of leaders and is a clear breach of the equality agenda.
The position should be renamed “deputy Taoiseach”, officially spelled with a lower-case “d”. Using an upper-case “D” would also imply a hierarchy of leaders while using a lower-case “d” merely implies that the deputy Taoiseach has lost a coin toss.
Both taoisigh should formally be referred to as “Taoiseach and deputy Taoiseach” but only to avoid starting a sentence with “Deputy Taoiseach”, which does require a capital “D”. Starting a sentence with a lower-case “d” would be ungrammatical and disrespectful, suggesting the deputy Taoiseach had been rebranded in the style of a budget airline.
Likewise the Office of the Taoiseach and deputy Taoiseach should be abbreviated to OTdT. After a few months, everyone will stop finding this OTT.
It is very important that all OTdT statements are issued in the name of both taoisigh, except for certain issues where it is more important not to embarrass either taoisigh.
In Belfast these issues include royal visits, papal visits and military commemorations. In Dublin they may now include Ictu visits, Siptu visits and Workers Party commemorations. Whatever the issues, it is of utmost importance that they are never written down so that OTdT can make the list up as it goes along.
With the leadership question resolved, the next step is appointing a cabinet. Stormont has moved beyond the unseemly horse- trading which has so discredited politics in the Republic.
Instead, ministers are appointed under the mathematical objectivity of the D’Hondt formula, expressed as S=V/lcd, where S equals seats, V equals votes and lcd refers to either the lowest common denominator or a lower-case “d”.
Fine Gael and Labour should devise their own formula allowing everyone to feel this is “my cabinet too”, ie E=MC2. However, they might want to be clear this does not also stand for “Enda is a Mayo culchie square”.
After choosing a cabinet, both parties need to agree a programme for government. With such different views around the table, there is a danger this could take a long time or produce only anodyne nonsense.
In Northern Ireland, this danger is avoided by taking a long time to produce only anodyne nonsense. Stormont’s current programme for government comprises 60 pages of harmless waffle and took a year to draft, by which point everyone had forgotten all about it and circumstances had changed beyond all recognition. Hardly anyone has looked at it since.
Fine Gael and Labour should follow our example and aim to produce a document by mid-2012 containing broad agreement that jobs are good and poverty is bad, bulked up with some graphs and pictures of children. By then oil could be $300 a barrel and Spain could belong to the Chinese. Certainly, nobody will care about a one-year-late, four-year plan to merge the peat and seaweed marketing boards.
With the programme for government taken care of, all that remains is setting a budget. Ours is determined entirely in London. I’m sure the process in Dublin is far more continental.