Will this crisis mark the end of private sector primacy in Ireland?

My family lives all over the United States. For the first time in my life, friends and work colleagues ask me with concern how my relatives are doing. The American government seems to be failing badly in their efforts to manage the pandemic with a daily death toll reaching 3,000. On a personal level, I listen to my elderly parents express their fear about lifting lockdowns to restore the economy.

My father in California, who is in his late eighties, declares he is not leaving his house no matter what everyone else is doing, or perhaps because of what they are doing, namely leaving their own houses.

My mother in Texas laments the “idiocy” of politicians. Republican governor Greg Abbott has announced a “‘massive reopening” of businesses despite having one of the worst testing records in the country.

The extraordinary payment made by the Irish Government to rent private hospital beds illustrates how entrenched the fixation with privileging the private sector is, regardless of the current economic crisis

President Donald Trump’s blatantly incompetent handling of the coronavirus outbreak, along with the worsening economy, may be making the Republican Party nervous, but party leaders (and donors) are certainly not rushing to embrace a restoration of democratic principles and income redistribution.

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Having wedded themselves so tightly to a vociferously anti-state, anti-public welfare agenda, which is disseminated through loyal media platforms, they have little freedom to reform. Change would require a revolution.

It is not much better in the UK, where I am also a citizen. There, the public is enduring the stress and hardship of lockdown after more than a decade of austerity and four years of endless politicking about Brexit. The alleged clarity that the last election provided, with a sweeping Tory majority, has diminished because of repeated government mistakes, lack of transparency, and above all, a seeming unwillingness to assume responsibility.

As in the US, the prime minister clings to a rhetoric of strength and determination designed to obscure failures in government policy, including extending the transition period. He cannot adapt to the practical necessity of thinking differently.

The status quo

In contrast, in Ireland, President Michael D Higgins has warned against sticking with the status quo. He recently wrote that the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated that “New ideas are now required – ideas based on equality, universal public services, equity of access, sufficiency, sustainability”.

If he is right, then how can these ideas come to fruition in the current context? Leaders in democracies are either courting authoritarianism while enabling business interests or, at a minimum, they are unwilling to break fundamentally with the assumed primacy of the private sector.

We are not immune to this private sector capitulation here. The extraordinary payment made by the Irish Government to rent private hospital beds illustrates how entrenched the fixation with privileging the private sector is, regardless of the current economic crisis.

There is, therefore, a lot at stake between adhering to the old way of doing things and making the leap to adopt a new approach. As government negotiation talks get under way in earnest this Thursday, will they opt for the latter, especially since the electorate voted for change earlier this year?

If they are going to heed President Higgins’s call for a new era in policymaking, then the Green Party should be considering three general rules for policymaking within the next government.

The first is that the next government must encourage – rather than be afraid of – vigorous public debate on what society and the State should look like after the pandemic.

The second should be to dismantle policy silos and instead, present transparent, interconnected policy agendas. Importantly, the government needs to commission the necessary data collection to compliment these agendas, as too often the data is weak or unavailable.

A forward-thinking discussion will have to consider how tourism can intersect with climate action and produce better jobs; the potential of alternative forms of ownership, like co-operatives, to improve working conditions and wages; and the positive impact of collective bargaining rights, which provide migrants as well as Irish citizens a platform for advocacy. The point is that new policymaking will have to be complex and doable, and thus effective.

Learn from the solidarity

The third should be to learn from the solidarity shown in this crisis. This would mean linking success in facing other challenges like climate change to cross-sector engagement, as we have seen here with efforts to recruit volunteers, supply health services and supermarkets, and help laid-off workers and small businesses to survive.

If the foreseeable future around the world remains resistant to policy change and new ideas, then Ireland can prove once more to be the exception by seeking to make new ideas a political reality.

Dr Shana Cohen is director of TASC, the think tank for social change