You have probably seen it already. I’m hoping that it was genuine anger and not thinking about the next election. My reaction and those of thousands of people was ‘at long last’ after a truly terrible week and many terrible weeks to come somebody turned to a Government Minister and said stop the lying, look at what you have done, look at the state of us.
Our country has been brought to penury alright, and will remain in penury.
Personally I do not know if anyone else can fix this. Yes the ECB and IMF will ‘fix’ it for us – and not in a good way. But the lack of leadership in Ireland on all sides of the political divide is scary. There are about five people in the Dáil who may be good in a government, who understand their brief before they get it and want to learn how to fix things if they don’t know and won’t be swayed by ‘Public Affairs Consultants’ on large retainers to corporate bodies or dependent on the votes of independent TD’s to stay in government.
Our banking system is broke, our economic system is in tatters but so is politics, leadership and decision making and it has been for some time. Nobody has been able to tell us that we were in a mess and that things need to change and that yes it is going to be terrible but that they will act in the national interest rather than their own and be believable.
Candidates for an election have been selected already or will be shortly – and they are generally councillors who have worked their way up the ‘system’ or the family members of sitting TD’s – already in the system and continuing the arsing about. (Look at the Wicklow Labour Party Convention on Sunday night next if you want to see what I am talking about.)
If we remain a country who selects it’s public servants on the basis of fixing holes in roads, providing voters with a citizens information service (which is already provided for by the state) or who they were the child/wife/brother of or played GAA for then we will remain a failed nation. We do not elect legislators or policy specialists. We elect teachers, a few solicitors, a few doctors, publicans. We don’t elect many scientists, CEO’s, mothers, nurses, artists, engineers, accountants, entrepreneurs, administrators, social policy researchers.
If this country is to recover we need to reform how we pick people to stand for public office, what we expect them to do and how we expect them to do it. Clientelism has got to go. We must sort out the issue of how men lead this country and women don’t want to or can’t seem to be allowed to. And stop fecking talking about quotas providing privilege and unfair advantage. It is simply un-natural in a modern world for a country to be ruled by a parliament made up of 87% men. Find a way for women who can lead and know something about running a country to be able to enter public service on behalf of their neighbours, male and female. We must find a way for all the leaders and legislators who are out there to be able to come forward, be selected, voted for and not have to climb the greasy pole to do so. Get rid of the pole.
We also have a media that has failed us in not being able to answer the questions and sometimes being prevented in asking them. When chairpersons of public utilities can stop the publication and investigation of stories and corruption by calling editors and making threats. When media ownership in this country is placed in the hands of so few. Where property sections flourished and nobody shouted stop or ridiculed those that did for talking the economy down. It was never about people having enough, it was always about having more, wanting more, the latest ‘more’. And it was increasingly about opinion and comment and not news or why something was being done the way it was.
All those arguments about the public versus the private sector, the haves versus the have nots, how stupid do they look now? When we see what greed, cute hoorism, turning the other cheek and then picking up the pieces by guaranteeing corrupt banks has actually done to us. This was financial BSE – banks feeding money to themselves (staff and directors) to buy developments, funding developers and offering them more like it was smarties they were giving out. Governments when they weren’t giving people tax incentives to do this were making money from these practices – cyclical systems feeding each other, and the temperature going up all the time.
We kept being told we were a rich nation, yet people still waited on hospital trollies, people died waiting for cancer to be diagnosed beause they were not ‘private patients’, basic education was far from free, transport ticketing systems could not be integrated and the Luas never joined up. Children and adults were abused for decades in systems overseen by the state and we still could not change or enforce the laws and make sure that their rights were protected.
And then the notion of the rich country dissappeared and the banks failed. For months the European Central Bank and European Monetary bodies have been trying to get in to fix it, to get the government to admit that they made the wrong choices and that something had to be done because of the threat to other nations. Billions were bandied about and nobody knows what a billion is anymore we owe so many of them or need so many of them to remain a nation in hock. People outside this country speculated on our debt in the form of bonds – taking bets on us and we owed them money and it was expensive money.
Last weekend the European number-crunchers said no more and started briefing against our Government and still the denials came from Merrion Street and on international media where viewers cringed when they saw the likes of Dick Roche spinning rubbish over and over and over again.
There is still a lot of money in this country and there is still an economy. But there is also real poverty, real exclusion and a deficit of hope. There are people with disabilities worrying about whether someone will come to visit their house to get them out of bed in the morning and help them live their lives. There are families wondering how they will cope with children they can’t parent. The houses that were built and bought with mortgages that should never have been given will remain huge stressors as people can’t pay for them and worry about where they are to live. There are people who never owned a house wondering if they ever will. There are thousands who do not know the ECB and IMF are here and don’t want to know either. There are bags being packed and plans being made and people leaving and being lost and the pool of people to pick from to fix the country will diminish even further.
And still we have no leadership. One leader or one party is not going to fix this. Our current electoral system of checks and balances aka multiple seat constituencies has to change radically so that we can find leaders who are literate in how to do things and how to change things. And if anyone mentions needing an Obama please kick them in a place where it hurts. If a bishop pops up his head saying we need prayer please do likewise – it won’t be long now but they will.
Great post but I might have to go back under the covers after reading it.
Oh Suzy wow thats us alright, and I agree with a dive under duvet. But thank you for saying it.
really excellent post, just a pity that it has come to this
Whilst I agree with the frustration and anger, I think the point you make about who we elect can be scrutinised further. There is no training for running a country. Even economists live in the world of theory as their training. You can’t get practical experience at this stuff. There’s nothing to say that a CEO or Scientist would do a better job than, for example a solicitor or accountant. The reality of the matter is that if you are a successful ANYTHING, why would you want to take a job of a politician?
So we vote for solicitors, etc. as these are the only people putting themselves forward.
I don’t believe this is any different to other countries.
The point of there being no choice is very well made. The current gov’t need to go, but when I look around at the alternatives they are just as bad – Eamonn Gilmour is already lying saying where we won’t make cuts (can he do basic maths?), and Enda Kenny has shown himself to be a baffoon by doing John F. Kennedy speeches on TV.
So here’s what we’re left with:
1. The country needs to make swathing cuts.
2. No politician will be straight up and tell us how they would cut health, education, social welfare, etc. for fear of it being unpopular and therefore not getting elected.
3. Ergo, they are all lying
4. Someone will allow the IMF to do it, so they don’t have to be the person who wielded the knife.
Great post – needs to be read far and wide as I think it says what a lot us are trying to articulate.
I liked this post
The IMF needs to be run, with its 3 year entrapment loans and we need to hold on to our natural resources.
This won’t happen with the current political caste.
I’ve had that discussion a few times since I arrived to Ireland…
If family makes people on goverment that good… why did Ireland remove one of the older and better breeded power related family as head of State? (UK Monarchy)
Anyway, the problem are not politicians, the problem is a society that still believes that every person should be entitled to a vote with the same weight. That makes democracy a dictatorship, and one of the worst case, the dictatorship of the stupid and the rule of the liers that know how to convince the stupids.
And it’s not just Ireland, it’s all the modern democracies.
BTW, I hate when the people say that this mess is not their fault. Irish citizens choose those people to rule this country, irish citizens cheered when tax where cut, house prices where rocketing and debts where just mad, irish citizens used to be proud of how rich this country was (no infrastruture, no proper health system, no child care… but rich) so people is guilty.
Sad for us (10% of the population) that could not elect representatives but have to pay for the “brilliant” ideas of the ones the Irish citizens choose, while we were bullied by saying that Ireland was extremely poor and just awash of money.
You make a lot of valid points here, particularly about the relationship between the disconnect of the needs of an electorate and the representatives we elect. If talk about parish pump politics banished it, we would have changed something. As it is, we are in the middle of a culture that values favour brokering without any sense of ‘the people’ as being separate from the operations of the state. We hear it in the sighs of John Bruton on #vinb last night: as if FF’s fate was tied directly to all of ours.
At the same time, we must also recognize that ‘we’ are not all in this together: this position denies conflict, glosses over the very material struggles that you makes reference to. I’m as pissed off as you clearly are but the choices that have been made are the result of the mobilisation of interests at various levels, most of whom are not elected at all. IBEC, SIMI, CIF, IAVI, HRI to drop a few culprits, and yes, ICTU as well for climbing on board the partnership train when really hard questions were asked about 5 years ago.
For as long as I can politically remember, I’ve been hearing about how insidious FF’s reach is in this country. My father’s frustration at shallow managerialism. My mother’s reluctance to let go of historic allegiances despite the cuts and inequalities of the 1980s. I hope for their decimation as an organisation in the next election. Recognition of interests as communities of people is not enough, we must really want it to happen.
Great post- as you rightly point out, we are dealing with systemic corruption & failure at every level of Irish society and across all societal institutions, and the only way to address that is systemic (not cosmetic) change. I don’t believe there is the leadership or more importantly the will amongst any of our political leaders to take up this challenge. If the current catastrophe doesn’t prove enough of a catalyst to mobilise all of us to demand structural change- what will, ever?
Brilliant post Suzy – A call to action rather than more hand-wringing. I have been asking people what can we do to find and promote talented people to elect. I really want to know the answer. We are in a talent void & we have an opportunity and a duty to fill it.
While strongly agreeing with you, recognise need to move away from blame game. If electorate consistently elect representatives based on “experience” in politics and quality of constituency work, then naturally representatives or potential representative will do their utmost (irrespective of what they want to do for the good of the country when in power) to appeal to that demand from the electorate.
If I hypothetically were highly qualified to make a positive policy/legislative contribution and wanted to stand for election (which I actually would like to do), why should any local cumann/constituency committee select “inexperienced” me when someone else may have 14 years hard graft at council level or on the opposition benches, and when the electorate would be unlikely to elect an “unknown”. That pragmatic reality is what applies in every constituency and party, and I don’t see any easy way around it, even if there were a strong will at leadership level.
Eleanor – do you really think that “promoting talented people” is what this is about?
Lenihan has a Cambridge 1st – we were told he was brilliant.
A lot of people seem to think that this can be solved by a new and better elite.
That is just a joke.
Well said! Your are 250% right. The political system is failed in this country. The 1950′s economy policy, the 1980′s depression and now again in 2010 we see a country completely collapse with idiots without a clue running it. We need more women, we need more business leaders, we need a system that reflects modern society and protects its citizens.
Necessary but not sufficent is the relevant cliche C.Flower.
The very fact that Lenihan is one of the few highly qualified people in the Dail meant that his eloquent views were put on a pedestal and weren’t questioned by his peers.
Eloquence does not equal cop-on unfortunately.
A more qualified (and dare I saw more representative of our now highly qualified society) group of representatives would assist in better government. It’s not a panacea, but would be an important step.
Absolutely spot on. Excellent post – controlled but with passion and rationale.
This country has been bought to it’s knees by a small elite group who have taken us for the biggest fools ever! The tide has to change
I suggested a possible means during the summer to broaden the electoral base rather easily that would allow as many people from as diverse a pool as possible to run while not having to worry about seats being lost due to transfers, that would give us a parliament proportionate with the national vote (the upside of a national list system) and ensuring that the voters not party insiders were deciding who was elected. The problem with existing electoral system is that it reward those who don’t take risk, and ensures that safety first is the rule when picking candidates.
http://www.danielsullivan.ie/blog/?p=1417
You read it I’m sure, cos you’re interested in engaging in a real debate about practical options. Right?
C Flower – You are applying your own definition to the word “talented”. I never mentioned academic qualifications or any elite. I mean fit to govern. We need to identify the leadership & societal qualities that make for good parliamentarians and then find and promote those people. Sounds vague I know but it has to be a better approach that dynasties and parish pump pothole fixers.
Link is 404ing Daniel and I am engaged in real and practical debate, I’m supporting Claiming Our Future as well as other initiatives in the area.
I think we have to have a list system that is not based on who you know or have done favours for at local level. Half list, half local – Electorates should vote for policies and track record and opinions of parties\movements. This would allow parties to select people to fill vacancies on a non clientelist basis. We have created the system and electorate which elects locals politicians to national office who for the most part do not have experience or even interest in legislation and oversight of policy but are great advocates at sorting out medical card applications.
Link is back again, for some reason site went off-line last night. As for Claiming Our Future given the restricted nature of that initiative and the background of those in forefront of organising it I have to wonder at its practical nature in terms of a debate. Hopefully more will come from it than the rather vague aspirational statements that emerged from that first get together.
The key problem with a list system is that it is open to being based on who you know or have done favours for in the party at central level instead of based on who you know or have done favours for at local level.
The problem with focusing on changing the system alone (which some of the political scientists have tended towards) is that doing that without changing the mindset of the electorate leaves any new system being open to being gamed by those interested primarily or solely in the local angle.
I’d add Sociologists to your list of professions to help run the country but then we know the rep of sociologists in power. I give you Mrs Ceaucesu, Mrs Milosovic …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcs3JG90nZc
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