Too little democracy is indisputably bad, but too much also has its drawbacks, particularly when it is local democracy, argues Dan O'Brien.
It is often said that political power in Ireland is more centralised than in other developed countries. Dermot Lacey (Opinion, February 25th, "Time for a real debate on local government") thinks this is lamentable and believes it to be self-evidently true that devolving power from Dublin would make for better overall democracy. Evidence from abroad suggests that this contention is dubious. Experience at home shows it to be plain wrong.
Superficially, the case for giving local councils more say has strengthened because devolution often looks like the modern way. Over the past decade and a half Belgium has become a federation, Spain has, too, in all but name, and Italy looks like following suit. Even the most centralised of European states - Britain and France - have pushed power downwards.
There has usually been a dual motive for this: to make governance more legitimate and its workings more efficient. Neither applies to the Republic.
Legitimacy first. In areas where regional identities are strong or strengthening, from Scotland and Flanders to Catalonia and Lombardy, demands have grown that power be clawed back from unresponsive capitals.
Such yearnings are limited in the Republic, which enjoys unusual geographic cohesion. While those outside the Pale may occasionally complain about the goings-on up in Dublin or of capital-living Bord Pleanála officials scuppering their plans for dream-homes, there is no significant sense of grievance that the interests of Dublin trump those of people outside it (probably because national politics has a considerably greater local focus than elsewhere).
As regards efficiency, what grounds are there to give Dermot Lacey and his council colleagues more power?
An American sociologist once said that because of two trends - globalisation and the increasing complexity of government functions - states have become too small to do the big things and too big to do the small things. While this may be true for sizeable countries, it is not for small ones like Ireland.
With a population of four million (less than many regions and some cities in other European countries) Ireland has always been too small to influence the big things, such as the rules of the international economy or the management of the world's environment. But for the small things - policies on education, tax and attracting investment for instance - the Republic's size is just right.
And this is ever more important as nimble government is crucial to success in today's world (it is no coincidence that most of the planet's richest economies and best-functioning societies have populations of less than 10 million).
But even if it did make objective sense to devolve some functions of the State, the uninspiring record of local government over more than a century militates against.
Consider corruption. Everywhere, this tends to be more prevalent at sub-national levels of government. In 2002, 50 former US mayors were behind bars. Closer to home, France's city halls are a byword for jobbery, and last summer Madrid's newly elected regional government collapsed when assembly members took payments to miss a crucial vote.
Ireland is unusual only in that the corruption contrast between the local and national is starker than elsewhere. While national politics is relatively clean and not as corrupt as is popularly believed (a study by UCC academics Neil Collins and Mary O'Shea gives excellent context), local politics has a long history of sleaze.
The only example of anything approaching systemic political corruption recently has been in planning where, after this power was given them in 1963, local auth- orities' votes were, on occasion, swayed by monied interests.
And the inglorious record of local politicians predates even 1963. When local democracy was introduced in 1898, it was quickly blighted by bribery and influence-peddling.
By 1926 the gift of council employment was taken from local politicians after repeated cash-for-jobs scandals (its replacement, the Local Appointments Commission, has been a model of probity).
Indeed, so bad was the local government experience in its first quarter-century that when the pre-independence Act was modified in 1925, it wisely allowed central government to suspend erring or inept councils for up to three years and place their responsibilities in the hands of professional administrators.
But local politicians still did not clean up their act, and both governments in the following 15 years were forced to resort to this punitive sanction frequently.
Unexpectedly, if not unsurprisingly, it proved so popular that voters sometimes refused to choose another council so that they could keep their appointed commissioners.
Outshone by more honest and efficient bureaucrats, power drifted from councils. In 1940 the County Management Act formalised the system. The balance between appointed and elected representatives, which is skewed towards the former more than in other countries, remains largely unchanged to this day.
And it has not only been in relation to sleaze that sub-national levels of government come out worse than their national counterparts.
They are also almost universally more spendthrift, at least partly because they know that they will be bailed out by central government if they overspend.
Fiscal indiscipline in California opened the door of the governor's office to Arnold Schwarzenegger last year. In Britain, councils had their spending teeth pulled in the 1980s because so many refused to balance their books. In Italy today regional governments sometimes appear intoxicated by their new expenditure powers and struggle to manage their finances.
At home, the abolition of rates in 1977 went unlamented by rate-payers, and there is no grassroots demand for their reintroduction because it would appear that when it comes to the deathly inevitability of paying taxes people prefer that theirs go to the Exchequer than into local authority coffers.
A long history of budgetary chaos, up to and including Dublin City Council's recent crisis, does little to suggest that municipal profligacy would not result if local politicians ever really got their hands on the public purse strings.
Given all this, Dermot Lacey should be careful what he wishes for. If he is successful in starting the debate about local government that he wants, it could become a matter of regret; he might end up with fewer powers, not more.
Dan O'Brien is senior Europe editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit