There can be no doubt about the contribution that successive national partnership agreements have made to our economic and social progress. Much of the spectacular economic growth we have achieved has been due to the basic trade-off in these agreements between personal tax cuts and pay moderation.
Thus, although Irish manufacturing sector output per hour rose three times more rapidly than among our major trading partners between 1987 and 1996, hourly wages increased by 20 per cent less than elsewhere.
Allowing for increases in the cost of living, the moderate pay increases of this nine-year period raised by just over one-eighth the purchasing power of an Irish worker on the average manufacturing wage. However, so far as after-tax earnings are concerned, parallel tax cuts practically doubled that increase in purchasing power.
During that period, therefore, one half of the additional purchasing power of a typical worker came from tax cuts successive governments had traded for pay moderation. And, of course, the moderate pay increases thus negotiated contributed in a major way to the huge increase in employment that took place in the years after 1993.
Since 1996, however, we have been able to pay ourselves rather better, with increases that have been somewhat higher than elsewhere. And this de facto shift in the balance of our pay strategy has now been given formal recognition in the new Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, with its 5.5 per cent annual pay increases.
In addition, successive agreements have included many other provisions extending over the whole range of social policies. This is even more true of the latest agreement, which runs to some 75,000 words and covers an extraordinarily wide range of issues.
The exceptionally wide range and detail of the social issues addressed are in part a reflection of the fact that the community and voluntary sector of our society has in recent years been involved as a full partner in this negotiating process.
Before raising the question of the impact of this upon our democratic political system, it should perhaps be said that there is little to quarrel with in most of the programme's proposals. Indeed, they include a number of useful reforming provisions, to some of which it may be worthwhile to refer lest they get lost in the somewhat limited coverage that has been given by the media to the details of the document.
First, a particular welcome should be accorded to the fact that, very sensibly, the implementation of this programme is expressly predicated on the achievement of a 5.6 per cent growth rate over its 33-month life - with provision for slower delivery if this growth rate is not attained.
Next, an important step forward is the acceptance by the unions of the need for some element of open recruitment at various levels both to and within the civil service, as well as of the need to resort to external recruitment where skills and expertise are in short supply within the civil service itself.
Similarly, we should welcome the acceptance by both the Department of Finance and the unions of the need to "benchmark" public service pay to the market.
On the one hand, in respect of highly skilled people who enjoy, or are capable of attracting, high pay rates in the private sector, loosening the present public service pay straitjacket by benchmarking should make it possible both to retain key skills and experience, and to attract new skills from outside.
On the other hand, albeit less probably, in cases where some other civil servants may be overpaid for the work they are performing - especially when account is taken of their security of tenure and their right to inflation-proofed occupational pensions - "benchmarking" could pave the way for cost-saving organisational reforms.
The programme also makes it clear that while "within each sector internal relativities would be a relevant criterion . . . traditional or historical [the italics are not mine, they are in the text] relativities between groups in a sector would not prevent the Benchmarking Body from recommending what it considers to be appropriate pay rates on the basis of existing circumstances".
If this provision of the programme delivers us from the vicious circle of relativity claims by different groups in the public service, our entire society will be the better for it.
Another very welcome feature of the programme is the establishment of a National Framework for Family Friendly Policies, the function of which will be to develop measures to assist in reconciling work and family life.
There are also signs in this programme of an equally belated acceptance of the urgent need for more targeting of areas of disadvantage. There should be a particularly warm welcome for the announcement that by the end of this year the 25 most deprived urban and rural communities will have been designated for targeted action through front-loaded budgetary action.
Finally, it is good to hear that the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is to conduct a review of parental leave, although it is disturbing to hear that this urgently needed study will not start until next year.
It should, perhaps, be added that in order to tackle the many issues that this programme addresses, more than 35 new bodies are to be established at national level, almost all involving participation by social partners.
All this raises a question, however, about the nature, role, and quality of representative democracy in our State. The matters contained in this programme are the very stuff of traditional politics: they are precisely the kind of things that one expects to see addressed in political party manifestos and to hear regularly debated in parliament.
Now, however, they are discussed, argued about, and finally agreed - sometimes in very general or even ambiguous terms - by consensus among what are called the social partners.
It is not over-straining words to compare the system we have thus evolved here to aspects of the corporatism that was practised in Portugal and Italy before the second World War and, indeed, in both Spain and Portugal up to the 1970s - with, admittedly, one striking difference. Our people have the chance to choose every few years the Government that monitors and guides the negotiations between civil servants and the social partners. By contrast, under the former regimes of those southern European states, such a choice was denied the electorate.
That is, of course, a very important difference, but we do face what has now become a serious problem in keeping the electorate sufficiently interested to participate in the choice of alternative teams to undertake these negotiations with the social partners and then administer the policies that emerge from this negotiating process.
There are, of course, many reasons for the falling turn-outs in our parliamentary elections. First, the former powerful emotional commitment of many people to political parties, reflecting the strong feelings aroused by the Civil War has gradually weakened. There are, indeed, indications that core support for our parties is no more than half what it used to be, the remainder of those who cast their vote at election times being essentially floaters.
Moreover, the emergence of concrete evidence of what had previously been only suspected, i.e. financial misbehaviour by a small minority of politicians, has latterly had a disproportionately adverse effect on public attitudes to politics.
Finally, the fact that during the past decade the emergence of hitherto undreamt of coalitions, e.g. Fianna Fail/Labour and Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrats, has deprived many people of the motivation to vote for a party in order to secure a preferred Government format.
But when to all these disincentives to political commitment is added a growing recognition that many, perhaps even most, of the policies to be implemented are not really choices by politicians but are rather consensus choices by sectoral interests - who admittedly now include the largely disinterested community and voluntary body representatives - the incentive to vote at election times is further weakened.
And all this has been happening so gradually that dangerously few people - and, I believe, very few politicians - are conscious of this shift away from traditional representative democracy and towards a new, and it has to be said, thus far largely benevolent form of corporatism.