Time for voters to look up and focus on bigger picture

Punishing politicians will solve nothing unless voters begin to understand the consequences of the kind of choices they make in an election

THE MOMENT the country has been waiting for has finally arrived and a date has been named for a general election. It is shaping up to be an event that will transform the landscape of Irish politics even more fundamentally than people had already imagined.

It has been clear for some time that Fianna Fáil would be knocked off the perch it has held since 1932 as the biggest party in the country. Now the party’s very survival is at stake and it is not clear that it will even be the major opposition party.

The naming of the date for the general election has concentrated the minds of everybody in politics but, one hopes, it will also focus the minds of the voters.

While Fianna Fáil-led governments have brought the country to a sorry pass, voters need to remind themselves that their rulers were not imposed by some force outside their control but were elected freely by us.

Politicians certainly need to learn serious lessons from the disastrous mistakes of the past decade but, unless the voters learn those lessons as well, the country will be doomed to repeat them at regular intervals.

It is no accident that what was for so long the biggest and easily the most popular party in the country has twice brought the country to the verge of economic ruin. Fianna Fáil was so powerful precisely because it persuaded enough people that somebody else would pick up the tab.

The flaw at the heart of the Fianna Fáil-PD coalition was that it persuaded itself, and a majority of voters, that taxes could be slashed while public spending went through the roof. The housing boom and the banking collapse made the situation far worse but the whole edifice was unsustainable.

The deep unpopularity now being suffered by the hapless Brian Cowen and his colleagues arises from the fact that since the autumn of 2008, the Government has had to make the people pay for the excesses of the previous decade. If not for the banking crisis they might have been able to do so without the intervention of the EU and IMF, but politically they were doomed one way or another once the bubble burst and tax revenues started to plunge.

The voters may choose to punish Fianna Fáil for providing bad leadership but that, in itself, will solve nothing unless people begin to understand the consequences of the kind of political choices they make in an election.

There has been a lot of media chatter over the past few months about creating a “new republic” and “reinventing democracy”. While it is all to the good that people seriously engage with issues facing the country there is, in truth, no magic wand that can make our problems vanish into thin air. Fostering the illusion that there is an easy way out is actually dangerous. The last thing the country needs is a “strongman”, or even “three wise men”, to whom the task of rescuing us can be handed. What we actually need is a government that will make the State we already have work properly and efficiently.

One of the positive aspects of the EU-IMF programme is that it will force whatever government is in power to get tax revenue and public spending in line. Voters now have a responsibility to take their politics seriously enough not to elect a government committed to clearly unsustainable policies in the future.

Political reform is an essential first step in the creation of a more responsible democracy and it is heartening that Fine Gael and Labour are committed to it. Abolishing the Seanad is all very fine but the real priority should be to make the Dáil work more efficiently.

Two basic reforms are required to make that happen. One is to change the way the Dáil does its business so that all TDs can participate in the work of framing legislation. The second is to change an election system that punishes TDs who try to be legislators and rewards those who see their role as messenger boys.

Enda Kenny has promised Fine Gael will reform the committee system by slimming down the current number of 25 to nine or 10 and giving those bodies real power so that government and opposition TDs can have a meaningful input into how the country is run.

The strongest resistance to this is likely to come from the “permanent government” of the Civil Service. During a fascinating seminar organised by former TDs in the Dáil chamber yesterday, ex-minister Barry Desmond put it colourfully. He claimed the Department of Finance had a lofty disdain for members of the Dáil as “defecating birds of passage” that are best ignored.

Giving the Dáil real power is one thing, but to get a majority of TDs who will focus on using that power in the interests of the common good rather than simply representing the interests of particular individuals or groups in their constituencies will be no easy matter.

The only way to get that done will be to abolish the current system of multi-seat PR, much and all as the electorate holds it dear. It was ludicrous for instance that in recent months Micheál Martin, as minister for foreign affairs at a crucial time in EU decision-making, had to spend most of his time in Cork South Central from a genuine fear that he might lose his seat if he didn’t do the basic constituency work. No other EU foreign minister faced the same problem.

Changing the electoral system will not be easy as there are strong arguments against every system, but some way will have to be found to introduce a form of single-seat proportional representation so that TDs don’t spend the vast bulk of their time doing pointless constituency work. The former Labour leader Frank Cluskey once described constituency clinics in the following terms: “A third of the people who turn up at clinics want you to do something impossible. Another third want you to do something illegal – and the rest of them are just lonely.”

If politics is to work properly, TDs will have to be given a real job with real power, underpinned by an electoral system that is not weighted against those who are serious about their role. For that to happen, though, the voters will have to look to the national interest and back the required change.