Marking Time

Government of my friends, by my friends, for my friends

One view that has been expressed during the debate over Bertie Ahern’s troubles is that we should not be devoting so much time to this relatively trivial matter. Sure, the Taoiseach has some grey areas in his financial past, haven’t we all, and anyway it’s a personal matter, nothing to do with running the country. We should put our energy into the real problems, the health service, increasing crime rates, road deaths, the over dependency of the economy on the unsustainable property boom, to name but a few.

I don’t agree with this view. I think that the issues raised by Bertie’s problems are more fundamental. They go to the heart of how we operate government and how we want democracy to work in this country.

National politics in Ireland is intensely local. There are many reasons for this. An electoral system consisting of multi-seat constituencies plays a major part, with elected representatives even at Cabinet level having to make sure that they keep things sweet back at the parish pump. The lack of power of local government also play a part. If you want anything more ambitious than a one-off planning permission then you’ve got to go to the TD.

The localism of Irish life is another factor. Just as in the GAA club comes before county, in the broader society ‘my village comes before my country’. We often hear of NIMBYism but more prevalent in Ireland is WAMBYism. What about my backyard? We see this tendency manifested in our failure to grasp the nettle and designate hubs for the National Spatial Strategy (every town can be a hub in its own way) and in our inability to see any benefits in a more centralised approach to health service provision as outlined in the (admittedly flawed) Hanly Report.

So, ‘all politics is local’, big wow, what’s that got to do with Bertie’s backhanders? Well, how this localism manifests itself in elections is that the voter is essentially selling his or her vote to the highest bidder – the candidate who will do most for their local area. They throw their weight behind a candidate and once he gets in it’s payback time. Government office is regarded as one of the spoils of election victory and the expectation among the people who put you there is that they get to share the spoils. More often than not the expectation is fulfilled.

The quid pro-quo in this is that it inspires an amost blind loyalty on the part of the voters who put our man into power, and once he’s reached the promised land they will do all in their power to keep him there.

Witness the wilful stubornness of the electorate who insist on re-electing tarnished representatives such as Michael Lowry and Beverly Flynn despite their wrongdoings. It is almost as if the voters in those constituencies are giving the two fingers to the rest of the country. Those lads up in Dublin won’t be telling us what to do.

This mutual scratching of backs extends to helping out our man in moments of financial difficulty (as in Bertie’s case) or keeping him in the lifestyle he is accustomed to (in the case of Charles Haughey) while our man can get on with the business of sorting out the country. Those who give financial support to politicians on the QT often make the claim that they are doing it to help democracy and for the good of the country. I think in many cases they genuinely believe this.

They believe in the trickle down effects of democracy. It starts with the old adage that what is good for Fianna Fáil is good for the country but there are a few intermediate steps that must be taken to carry ‘the goodness’ from Fianna Fáil to the country. What is good for Fianna Fail is good for developers and big business which has a knock on effect in terms of employment and economic growth which eventually trickles down a little bit of goodness to the rest of us. That’s the theory anyway.

There is a widespread belief in this country that this is a legitimate way to run a democracy. Of course we don’t like to admit it to ourselves. We like to see ourselves as above all that grubiness; enlightened citizens who vote carefully after weighing up the policy choices and philosophies of the candidates. However, we say one thing and do another, as election results and opinion polls consistently show. And so Bertie Ahern finds himself caught between the rock and the hard place of our idealism and our pragmatism, attempting to draw a line in the sand between the dirty details of Irish politics and the electorate’s denial of its complicity in them.

It is a peculiarly Irish version of democracy and one which has not served us well. Our potential as a nation has been severely retarded by the fragmented and inconsistent implementation of policy that pandering to localism encourages. We see it most obviously in the shortcomings of our health service, transport infrastructure, and housing development.

When we choose to brush Bertie Ahern’s financial misdeeds aside as no big deal and as not relevant to the running of the country we endorse this childish view of democracy as a legitimate one. It’s not. We need to cast it aside and grow up.

Mark Waters marked time at 8:30 am on October 3rd, 2006 Add a comment .

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Government of my friends, by my friends, for my friends

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