Naughton, Molloy and clientelism

In the wake of Bobby Molloy's resignation and the Naughton affair, there is much talk of clientelism. The truism that people vote for politicians who look after their constituencies has been well aired. Truisms, of course, are true. What's happening, however, is something altogether more interesting and complex.

The paradox is that clientelism has become more dangerous because it is less effective.

Though much of the comment on the Bobby Molloy debacle has tended to suggest that clientelism is essentially a rural phenomenon, this is wide of the mark, both historically and in contemporary terms.

The great Irish clientelism machines were those of New York, Boston, Chicago and other American cities, and the political operations constructed in independent Ireland applied these urban techniques to a rural society. And anyone who thinks that clientelism now is confined to the countryside needs to spend a few days with the likes of Gay Mitchell or Ivor Callely.

The reality is that the places where clientelism survives are defined, not by geography but by social class. The people who populate the waiting rooms in TDs' clinics are, almost by definition, the people who are most dependent on the State bureaucracy. They are the ones who need help and are willing to sell their votes in return. They are not, for the most part, company directors like Anne Naughton, whose concerns about her brother's trial led to Bobby Molloy's downfall.

This is one reason why the notion of that affair as a simple manifestation of clientelism has to be questioned.

The classic sociological definition of clientelism is: "A political relationship in which government officials have personal relations with non-government actors (clients) in which favours are exchanged for loyalty . . . the opposite of bureaucracy in which officials treat members of the public on the basis of official criteria."

The useful thing about this definition is that it allows us to see very quickly that most Irish life doesn't really work like this at all, at least not now. There may well have been a time when the State operated through networks of personal contacts. As the society has become more complex, and the State apparatus bigger, few officials at local or national level have personal relationships with the citizens they serve. It simply doesn't ring true to suggest that the State now is "the opposite of bureaucracy". To an overwhelming extent, it is an impersonal machine.

Nor is it really credible to suggest that most of the time, TDs command votes on the basis of the favours they have actually done or secured for their constituents. Such a notion misses the key point that in the overwhelming majority of cases the politician is doing nothing but generating correspondence. What is happening is not that someone is wheedling a favour out of the system, but that a politician is making an entitlement seem like a favour. What is being changed is not the substance but the appearance.

Professional politicians, until recently, did have an almost unique knowledge of how the system worked. Your TD couldn't get you a social welfare payment, but he or she could help you fill out the form and make sure it got to the right place, all the time suggesting, sometimes subtly, sometimes flagrantly, that a crucial touch of personal magic was being applied. Likewise, if you were being messed around, the politician was the only one who really knew how to intervene.

None of this is true any more.

There are 85 Citizens Information Centres supported by Comhairle around the country, and they operate very effectively as a bridge between the bureaucracy and the citizen. The Ombudsman's Office has been working for more than 20 years and has established itself as a trustworthy system of redress for citizens wronged by national, local or semi-State bodies. And, at least for those who have the education and the resources to use them, the internet and the Freedom of Information Act have jointly given people a new kind of access to the workings of the bureaucracy.

THIS IS where the paradox lies. Logic might suggest that as clientelism becomes less and less real, politicians might move on to something else and the system might become less corrupt. But the collapse of ideology and of party loyalty means that most of them have nothing to move on to. This is the only way of doing politics they know. So they become, instead, ever more desperate to preserve the system by pushing it into areas where it never pretended to operate before.

They can't do medical cards or dole payments, so what about court cases? They can't really help the poor, so why not seek a new, more assertive clientele, the sort of person who believes that, for example, a judge should listen to what they have to say.

This development wouldn't really matter if the public was completely confident that the justice system simply wasn't open to this kind of influence. But the Sheedy case, in which there was no public inquiry and no clear answer to many disturbing questions, precluded that kind of confidence. Which is why, this time, there has to be an objective investigation of the Naughton affair.

So long as the suspicion remains that the legal system is open to influence, there will always be politicians desperate to show that that influence flows through them.